Winds of the Old Days

The difference a generation makes. Once it was my generation who faced the possibility of combat. I didn't have brothers, but by the time my husband's brothers' lottery numbers were drawn, the belief was widespread that Vietnam was a fiasco--our government wasn't willing to do what it would take to win it, and wasn't willing to lose it--and more and more people found it obscene to keeping sending more and more young men into it. One brother got a "bad" number--a number likely to come up that year--and he'd be drafted. Their dad helped the unlucky brother get into the National Guard so he would stay stateside and out of combat.

Now it's our children's turn. My grandchild is 17. Almost all my students are 18-21. I think many people won't examine how they feel about Bush's war until it gets personal--and with so few troops, it's not likely to get personal for most Americans. The question is, would you trust your child's life to leaders who have been so wrong so often--and who can't even provide protective gear? And that's why Cindy Sheehan has the ability to force us to face that question--she's one of the small minority of Americans who have been asked to sacrific for Bush's war. This gives her an authority to press the president on the issues he has stonewalled, like his hypothetical exit strategy.

But Bush can't tell her he'll bring the troops home, because he has no intention of bringing the troops home, no matter how this war goes. Permanent military bases staffed permanently with American troops--a primary, yet covert, reason he attacked Iraq--a plan the people of the Middle East recognize and oppose, with their lives, if necessary, but that Americans have not yet grappled with. It's just too painful to accept how this one president has changed what it means to be an American--because that changes each one of us for whom "American" is part of our self-identity. We used to despise the U.S.S.R. when that old world bully rolled over eastern Europe to build bases and control resources. And now, if we face the bully, we have to see that it is us. For many of us, that is so painful that we resist, with anger, anyone who tries to show us what Bush has led us to become.