Comments on: Has War Become A Second Class Citizen?

By: santacruzsam

santacruzsam — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 04:03:16 +0000

Absolutley astounding vacacy of any dialogue about war. The old line Democrats are goin” down. Oh well. purging is good. But the GOP company line makes them sound like puppets…..sort of like Stepford Wives! Yet this article is spot on, no one has the gonchas to talk about a war that costs 12 Billion a month! All talk about budgets is moot and ludicrous when we loan 60 billion to Saudi Arabia and borrow it from China. Indeed lets get real. Wait till the vets come home and get a voice. Look out!

By: mike_brewer

mike_brewer — Mon, 01 Nov 2010 06:46:09 +0000

Well articulated Leftfield. I am sure you recall the moniker, “chicken hawks.” It seems that the socioeconomic ratios in war never change much. It has always been a phenomena beyond my comprehension, in how we create a caste system in wartime.
“Only the dead know the end of war.” Plato

By: tiponeill

tiponeill — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 17:09:04 +0000

When Repubs are in power, there is a small anti-war movement among Democrats – but it is very subdued because the Dems have learned that politically the Repubs always make hay at the polls attacking anti-war Dems as unpatriotic.
When Dems are in charge – who is there to protest ?
War = Patriotism in the USA.

By: leftfield

leftfield — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 16:27:09 +0000

One reason is that most of the public hasn’t had a personal stake in the war. Less than 1 percent of Americans agree to active-duty service and far fewer than that have actually seen combat.

“For most Americans the wars remain an abstraction,”

And there you have it.

In my daily work there is a division between a small number of well-compensated professionals, a much smaller number of middle income types and an army of low-paid people who do the majority of the actual physical labor involved in getting the work done. It is not uncommon among the lowest paid workers to find that they have a spouse or a child serving in the military. Among the highest paid employees I have yet to come across one who has a child of age who is serving.

This, I believe, goes to the reasons behind today’s volunteer force. The people who start and profit from war remember very well at least one of the lessons from Vietnam: no draft=no mass protests and no massive civil unrest. During the American War in Vietnam, it seemed not uncommon that you knew someone who went and never came back or someone who came back but was never whole again. For me, it was a close relative and the kid down the street. Today, the dead and damaged are just names in the paper of people from a different walk of life.

And this is why we need columns like this reminding us that the dead and the damaged from America’s wars (on both sides of the conflict) are not just names in the paper; not abstractions, but instead someone’s father, mother, sister, brother or other loved one.