Posted on 09/03/2006 7:08:40 AM PDT by Rawlings
We had it all figured out. Born after Vietnam, we were the first American generation in the last century to never know a prolonged war. We convinced ourselves that if we just learned our history well enough, we would not be doomed to repeat it. How wrong we were.
We visited Holocaust museums, had college roommates of different races, signed commitments to diversity, and spent spring break in Third World countries building orphanages. If only the prosperity that funded such an education could have funded peace. Unfortunately, it could not.
As college students, we read Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man," presented as a guide book for a post-war world, and preaching that just around the corner awaited "Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Just a decade after we affirmed such an optimistic proclamation, it has become a symbol of a peaceful era we no longer know.
When Sept. 11 happened, we were told to spend more, and so we did. We gobbled up first homes, and bought our SUVs with zero down. We attended fancy schools on government grants, almost convincing ourselves we weren't at war. On our wedding days, we only briefly considered the awkward self-indulgence of a champagne toast while others tasted war just an ocean away. I am as guilty as the next.
We waved our American flags proudly, but then as war became a bit more complicated, we became angry. Our friends came back from Iraq changed men, and others still came home in body bags. In our lives, this was not what war had looked like. After all, Ronald Reagan had brought down Communism without ever firing a shot, and fighter jets had freed Kuwait.
Shocked and dismayed by world events, we attempted to blame a single man - George W. Bush - for the fate we found ourselves in. We blamed him for the rise of Islamo-Fascism in South Asia and the Middle East, unrest in the Palestinian territories, and today we blame him for terrorism around the world.
We refuse to see that while we were busy reading Fukuyama on university lawns, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah were all preparing to wage a world war on Western values.
How could it be, we wondered, that even after all of our degrees, all of our study, and all of our peace, we could not decide when and why America should - or must - go to war? If we had just gotten everyone around a table to
talk, couldn't we have worked this out like civilized adults? While we liked the idea of taking down murderous dictators like Saddam Hussein, we couldn't decide if that was a justification for war. While we loved driving our SUVs to Starbucks to buy $4 lattes, we balked at the idea of going to war to protect our oil resources around the world. While Iran and North Korea developed their nuclear arsenals, we hosted peace protests. We held our heads in our hands, unable to grasp that things were just a little more complicated than we'd led ourselves to believe.
Like every previous generation, we are finally being forced to realize that freedom and peace cannot be preserved without great sacrifice. My father spent his early childhood with his father at war more days than he was home. My mother's father, riddled with shrapnel from his time in the South Pacific, forever hid his scars under a quiet exterior and long white cotton shirts. They never complained.
We must choose: We can have prosperity, but we cannot have it for free. We can have oil, but it comes at a cost. We can have peace, but only if we destroy those who will not tolerate it.
We can be the world's hegemon, but we cannot also then expect to win the love and admiration of our international peers. We must answer the fundamental question: When and why should we go to war?
I hope and pray my daughter will not be a wartime bride. Perhaps the epidemic will spare her generation. I will teach her, however, that she cannot expect peace. It is far from the norm of the human experience; it must be earned through blood and sacrifice.
Who's "we"? I belong to the generation Jessica's blathering about and I'm here to tell you, we're clueless.
Twenty two years old? Perhaps there is still hope.
Actually, public polling (which I put little stock in) tells us you're wrong. Young people today do, in fact, get it. Of course we're young and stupid like most of the 20-somethings throughout history.
And are all those hundreds of thousands of young troops overseas "clueless?" You want to know who is clueless? How about the boomers? You know...John Kerry and Co. who see the world in a weird Vietnamish prism. Today's youth see the world much clearly.
It takes two to tango but it only takes one side to start a war.
Good post. Thanks!
Maybe the young are beginning to get it. But don't count on it. Too many university campuses are totally controlled by leftist ideologues. Go to Cambridge, New Haven, Princeton, Berzerkley, Madison, Ann Arbor and other places. It's always blame America first and for everything.
Young people have yipped and yapped about being sent to war since time began. That is why it is the older people who make the decisions.
...there's a hefty...er, uh...fee.
Welcome to Free Republic, by the way.
Maybe it's because nothing you describe in your article indicates that you studied anything-- ever-- about history. Ignorant twit.
I go to the University of Colorado in Boulder. Supposedly on of the most flaming liberal schools on the planet. Turns out that it's, well, much more sane. The largest student group on campus is the College Republicans. Evangelicalism is huge at CU with several different conservative Christian groups. I'm in a couple of classes where the professors are quite obviously conservatives (one teaches his American Political Thought class under the theme of "American Exceptionalism"...that's John Winthrop stuff!). Just believe me when I say that kids today are not accepting carte blanche their professors' Marxist rhetoric. Of course campuses are still to the left and professors more so. Kids still, by and large, don't have a strong moral and political constitution. But it's changing in light of 9/11 and the religious awakening of sorts going on today.
No different than humanity is unique in the cosmos... American freedom is unique on earth.
I'm farther past 20-something than I like to admit. I often find myself falling into the middle-age trap of thinking kids are stupid, too.
As a group, though, y'all really aren't stupid; if you were, you would never survive to be 30. I think at that age you're just not experienced. Watch, contemplate, learn...work hard and play hard. You will survive and be better members of your respective communities for it.
There's nothing like a good case of life beating you down to help add perspective to your youthful exuberance. Remember people like me are counting on people like you to pick up the reins when we're too old and too 'stupid' to do so ourselves!
Another factor, that I believe will play an even greater role is the young veterans of the Iraq war and the WOT. Yesterday I watched the interaction between 2 mid-20's vets. One had been hit by IED's 3 times in his tour and had been discharged as partially disabled. The other was an EOD tech, preparing for his second tour. You could tell there was a lot unsaid, that didn't need to be said between them. Young men, but seasoned. They will play a huge role in the years to come.
And, based on the informal fallacy you launch into, I'm going to continue to assume that my generation is still clueless about structured debate.
And if you don't throw in your buck oh five, who will?
...and the blame probably does not include the good stuff. How many more people would be dead, had the United States not accomplished so much in the scientific, medical, military, fields and allowed those accomplishments to be shared with the world. The conviently one sided peace protestors who seem to think that peace is merely an absence of war, are the truely clueless. They lack the understanding of the nature of man, his tenuous relationship to government, his relationship to the Creator, and most importantly, an understanding of liberty and freedom, and their relationship to the destiny of mankind, that one without the other is impossible.
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