Wednesday, February 01, 2006

On apathy and protests

I'm certain that Victoria A. Bonney is a very intelligent and earnest young woman. She's a senior at Endicott College, which I gather is within hailing distance of Boston. There's a newspaper there, the Globe, which saw fit to publish an op-ed piece by Ms. Bonney. She's trying to make a case as to why her generation isn't protesting the Iraq war as Cindy Sheehan's generation protested U.S. involvement in the Viet Nam war, and is now taking the lead in the anti-war movement yet again. Ms. Bonney blames lots of things: ipods and cellphones, starbucks and playstation - she even unearths a link between the lack of protest and Attention Deficit Disorder.

She correctly finds apathy, but for all her wailing and gnashing of teeth, she fails to nail down the source: and it's a two-foot-putt --- THERE'S NO DRAFT VICKY. This is an all-"volunteer" army fighting the war. Even the foot soldiers caught in the Catch-22 of stop-gap re-enlistments were ensnared as volunteers (it's right there in the fineprint). The kids and the career warriors serving as target practice for Sunni snipers, or fodder for IEDs detonated by fanatical Fallujans are all there by choice.
By contrast, only three of the scores of guys I knew who fought in Viet Nam went there as volunteers. All the rest were drafted and didn't have the luck or the pull to stay stateside. They hated that a bad ping-pong bounce put them there. They were angered that the children of privilege could get deferments or use a well-placed phone call to get a cushy National Guard assignment. And all of the kids protesting KNEW that it could just as easily be them. Sure the war sucked, even righteous wars suck, Vicky (read ANY of great novels that came out of WWI or II) but they suck even more if your deferment gets pulled and you're 1-A with a low number.

People my age and older have a very different perspective on war and death than the so-called apathetic youth that Vicky rails on about. We saw the Viet Nam war on TV every night. We saw the coffins and the body bags. We saw the draft lottery broadcasts. Today the death and dismemberment are phantoms. There are no clips from the front, as there is no front. There are no press allowed inside Dover AFB. Reporters are embedded or bunkered inside a "green zone." Their stories only make the news when they are kidnapped or if they catch a piece of shrapnel on their good side.

It's a different world Vicky --- and our history major liar-in-chief knows it all too well.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Apathy is throughout our populace, not just the young people. But she's correct to assume that it's the young people who can, and should, make a difference. The hippies who fought against Vietnam raised the consciousness of the nation, largely one-on-one with their parents, who grew up with wars easy to support. But they also did damage by protesting the soldiers who came back, and by refusing to honor them. That was a mistake that still haunts us. It is still difficult to be anti-war without many people believing you don't "support the troops."