The War Generation
We now have a generation reaching adulthood that has
never known our nation at peace. We now have people old enough to join the
military to fight the war on terror whose earliest memories included
the war on terror. Terror is all they’ve known, terror is the mindset they’ve
been raised on.
And there is no end in sight for these children raised
on terror. There is no end zone to be reached, no promised land, no ultimate objectives
in this war. They have known nothing but war, and peace doesn’t seem to be
raising its head anytime soon for them.
No other generation of Americans has ever been through
anything like it. World War 2 lasted 4 years. People went to war and came home,
intent on enjoying the peace and prosperity they fought for. World War I lasted a brief year for us
Americans, and our entry into it was
with the understanding that it was the war to end all war. That is after all
the idea behind war, right? To put things to right so that the world is returned
to its normal state and we can once again enjoy peace?
But that’s no longer the world we live in, not a world
some of us have ever known. War is the new normal, war is just a part of life,
a part of who we are, or at least who we have become.
And we’ve saddled an entire generation to the vision
we’ve created. We’ve subjected our youth to an existence without the hope of--or
the blueprint for--peace.
I wonder what it must be like for them. I was born in
the Vietnam Era, can remember the end as helicopters rose from rooftops with people
trying to hold on. I was of a generation who experienced wars that ended. Perhaps
they didn’t have a clear-cut purpose or justification, but they eventually ended.
The war we’re involved in now has no end. It has no
justification, summary, no purpose. It is merely war. It is the inheritance we
bequeath to the generation that follows us. It is the unanswered question we
never got around to solving because we were too busy taking our children to
soccer practice and karate class. It was what we ignored in order to work extra
hours so we could purchase a little something for under the tree come
Christmas. I hope you enjoyed your new gaming system, junior.
I wonder how they view the world we’ve created for
them, wonder if they can see things through the same twisted lens we see
through. Perhaps when the television presents them with the information that
we’ve bombed some country they’ve never heard of, it won’t register much in
their consciousness. After all, why should they find it odd when it’s all
they’ve ever known. It’s just what America does.
I can’t imagine them questioning it or evaluating the
morality of it. It’s just something the government does, and they are not the
government. The government is some foreign entity, unanswerable and uncaring to
people such as they. How can they feel culpable for what the government has
done, even though it ostensibly does it in their name? The people who make the
decisions to bomb are as distant to them as the countries that are being bombed.
Given their lifelong immersion in it, how can they view
war as anything other than a force of nature? How can they perceive of it any
differently than primitive man saw the weather? Rainfall last night, bombs fall
tomorrow. Earthquakes or explosions in some other part of the world but it
doesn’t affect us.
How will they ever appreciate the value humanity has
placed on peace when we have not educated them on the subject? How can they
appreciate peace as a desired goal when we have for so long tolerated not
having a goal or an honestly debated cause for war? Our wars are justified by
lies and when the lies are discovered they are justified by the fact that we’re
too far involved to stop. What do these children-now-become-adults think of
when they hear the phrase “Blessed are the peacemakers?”
Maybe they’ll come to accept war the way other
cultures accepted human sacrifice. Perhaps they’ll just accept it as a cost of
existing: the gods, in this case weapons manufacturers, need to be appeased.
Maybe they won’t see it at all, so detached from it as they are.
But just maybe they will see it with fresh eyes. Maybe
more innocent eyes will see through the complex web of justifications we have
spun for ourselves and see the incredible waste, horror, and immorality behind war. I’d
like to think so. Somebody has to. For all the horror that war creates in the world
today, it is but the birthing pains of the ultimate horror, one which we are marching
closer to, our footsteps forward sounding with every explosion.
Nuclear war is every bit the threat it was in the cold
war era, it’s just we don’t seem to worry about it, or even think about it much
anymore. Once we had time for such matters but lately we’ve had other things on
our mind: retirement investments, lawn care, and binge watching TV series on
Netflix. We’ve gotten used to the possibility of nuclear annihilation, just as
our children have gotten used to perpetual war.
So let us think no more about it and get back to
matters more dear to our hearts. Let us return to Facebook and Fantasy
Football. Let us shut out the world outside our window we can no more change
than we can the weather. After all, there are new videogames to be played, Call
of Duty: Black Ops and Battlefield. That’s an activity you can engage in with
your child, a bonding experience. Or instead you can read a book, one of those
post-apocalyptic ones that seem so popular these days. Don’t worry unduly about
the children’s future, they’ll work it out, just like we did. What we don’t
think about can’t hurt us, right?
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