On War and Sacrifice

Maybe I've been supremely affected by reading my mother's Reminisce magazines over Thanksgiving Break, which I have a post about coming up shortly, but one of the featured sections got me to thinking, especially after hearing the President's speech last night about sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan.

The magazine usually features some sort of war-time memory section, and in it people, well, reminisce about what life was like during World War 2 (and sometimes Korea, but mostly WW2). It's actually pretty interesting reading about how people dealt with shortages of food, the alternate ways parents made food to deal with ingredients that were now being shipped to the front, rationing and how stamps were used to pay for things, how they came together as a community and helped returning soldiers, etc. In short, it was about dealing with sacrifice.

And so El Hijo and I were watching the speech last night and we came to the conclusion that what's really wrong here is that as a people, we're not being asked to sacrifice anything for this war. I'm not a fan of taxing in general nor of shortages. Nor of war, actually. But because we've evolved as a society so that we can have our butter, pantyhose, gas for the car and feed and equip soldiers too, war has gotten mighty impersonal. Unless you have a friend or family member enlisted and serving, there really aren't any reminders to you that we are at war until you turn on the news or read the papers.

If we are going to go to war, then we should feel it as a nation. We ought to be reminded that the reason you can't buy as much meat as you could before is due to the fact that it's being shipped to bases for American troops. We should realize that the reason we're forced to carpool to work is because of gas rationing. When we saw the line item for a war tax in our pay stubs, we'd know that was money we were sacrificing for the war effort.

And I'm quite sure that we wouldn't like it.

If we had done without much butter and meat for eight years, how angry would we be that 30,000 new troops were being deployed to Afghanistan? How angry would we have been as a people years ago when our government opened up a second war in Iraq which then drug on and on for years? Just how long would either of those wars actually continued if all of us had been sacrificing this whole time to pay for the war and feed and clothe the soldiers? I doubt it would've lasted for eight years. When we found out Haliburton was fleecing our government in Iraq, we would've probably been livid -- because we would've felt personally mugged if we had been paying a war tax that a crooked company profiteered off of. And that's what it would've been considered -- war profiteering. We don't hear about that term now, but war profiteering fired people up in the 1940s because while the average person sacrificed to accommodate a war effort, a few people took advantage of the situation to create their own wealth or resist an increase in corporate taxes. If we had been giving a percentage of our paycheck for four years to wage war and then we learned Haliburton executives pocketed lots of it, the public would've demanded swift action -- and they would've gotten it.

Instead, because we're divorced from the realities of war and we bear no personal cost, we can afford to shake our heads as if to say, "Well, that's how the world works." If we were forced to pay for it, we would demand war that was waged for the "right" reasons and as effectively and swiftly as possible. People by nature are pain-avoiders. Most species are. We seek to avoid pain. So, if war were painful to our wallets, our refrigerators and our way of life more generally, we would only wage war we really thought we should support. WW2 is a great example, because even in the face of Hitler, there were people who strongly resisted getting involved with the world's war. There were strong debates. When the nation was asked to give up things or buy war bonds to support the effort, there was more discussion, more propaganda, a clearer sense of cause and effect (not just vague references to being a "patriot"). See if conservative minded people would be willing to give up driving around their SUVs for the war they love to back. Put your money where your mouth is.

To be sure we're paying for it in other ways. Our nation's military budget is outrageous, and the money that goes into building bombs could just as easily go into providing scholarships for university students or for health care for that matter. We could pay for basic health care easily and not feel the pinch in the number of bombs we made as a nation. So the money is being appropriated, that's for sure. But we're also paying for it in apathy. We're apathetic as a people about this war because we're not personally caught up in it.

And apathy is an expensive product that democracies cannot afford to indulge in.

-- DV