I don’t tend to have a hard time getting outraged or upset about things. While walking around at the tea party protest a few weeks ago, one women proudly held a large poster of what I can only describe as a mangled fetus. I glanced at it, assuming it was another ridiculous “Obama=Socialist/Communist/Nazi/philatelist” sign, but it wasn’t, and I immediately had to turn away, as one more nanosecond of seeing it would cause some “projectile distress” from my stomach. I screamed “You should be ashamed of yourself!” and probably would have screamed more if Estes hadn’t had the calm sense of mind to drag me away.
I get upset and outraged by a lot of things. Call it a product of being socially aware and in my 20s for the entire decade of the 2000s. The decade that sent the loser of an election to the White House, that sent thousands of my peers to war, the decade that gave gigantic freebies to the rich and ignored the workers. The decade where we realized all our favorite baseball players were probably cheaters. I mean, say what you will, but the aughts were a pretty upsetting and outrageous decade.
So, it is with some trepidation that I admit that I am not particularly outraged or upset by the recently revealed footage of the helicopter gunmen opening fire on people in the street in Baghdad—footage that incensed an entire Internet yesterday. (Link does not go to video, but goes to a description, for those who don’t want to watch, which is totally understandable.)
War upsets me. The fact we were led into this war on false pretenses and fallacious promises outrages me. But, the conduct of these servicepeople, however mistaken, cannot and does not.
I think Bob Hebert is right in his New York Times column today:
There is a strong tendency, in our collective national consciousness, to give short shrift to the many thousands of Americans who are suffering grievously as a result of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The wars have become like white noise in our culture. They hit the front pages from time to time, and there are evenings when some aspect of the wars are featured on the national news telecasts. But we have no real sense of the extraordinary sacrifices that have been made by the young men and women who are fighting these wars in our name.
Our country is still at war, and it should go without saying that war is terrible. It’s easy to forget, though, because while tens of thousands of young men and women are over there, fighting a real, honest-to-god war, those of us left back here haven’t been asked to sacrifice anything, and the white noise of cable news and blogs masks the sacrifices these folks are making every single goddamn day.
They’re fighting enemies who don’t wear uniforms, who casually use children and women as shields and weapons. That regularly run hostile actions from headquarters in apartment buildings which house children, and send women on suicide missions. They are fighting enemies who do not blush to use tactics common with the worst of humanity, while trying to prove that the U.S. is better than that. This is a war that is as treacherous as World War II and as complicated as Vietnam.
Somewhere between the left’s human rights campaigns and the right’s human rights abuses, we lost the center. A rational center that understands that torture is wrong, that Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay have been heinous affronts to humanity, that indiscriminate killing of civilians is wrong, but also knows that war is bloody and frightful, that life and death hinges on knowing your enemy and taking actions which seem terrible.
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