Thursday, October 04, 2007
War
As I continue to watch the new Ken Burns epic on WWII, I marvel at how much has changed in the past half century. I was a kid in a Navy family with only a few memories of those times, the greatest being of my fear during blackouts along the east coast. But the unity of the country then, the fact that everyone was touched by the war ... and today, again responding to an attack on us (Pearl Harbor, 9/11), I have no sense whatever of a people pulling together. It's more than the botched job of the administration. It's more than a different kind of enemy, a scattered "religious" ideology rather than specific nations. I think something has been lost in the culture, something that once united us as Americans doesn't do the job any more. Or maybe everything is just too confusing now. Or maybe we haven't been hurt enough yet, 9/11 didn't do it, not enough folks got hurt directly. Maybe the probable future nuke will bring us together. Or maybe not. But as I watch the Burns epic, I marvel at the unified courage of a nation that rose to meet its historic challenge.
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2 comments:
You bring up a great question here, one that I've heard debated many times. A generation that hadn't yet come out of the Great Depression knew what sacrifice meant, and that is not something that I think the people of our day know. After 9-11 we were asked to shop, our sacrifice was to fill our houses with more junk. A market driven society, it seems to me, looses much of its humanity. Business is an amorphous entity without morals or concern, and as time has passed the subsequent generations have had their loyalties shattered and/or displaced away from the cultural identity to the more capitalistic "I" identity.
9-11 was a NYC event, Katrina was a Louisiana event. What does give me hope is that people are still willing to make the sacrifices when approached on a human level.
These days wars are dictated to the warrior class, those who serve tour upon tour taking our places in line. And why? Because without "voluntary" practices like these, the anti-war movement would pick up steam.
It's seems to me a strange combination of a populace who is more acutely aware that the government is not working for them, and work places will ship their jobs overseas/cut benefits/ and raid pension funds for higher stock prices that allow such apathy to occur (apathy or cynicism). But also strange that at the same time, if challenged for good cause, I do not doubt that Americans today would do some modicum of justice to the sacrifices previous generations made.
But it won't be until we are a nation of citizens again, and not of stock holders, that that will be possible.
Thanks for the good post.
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