On my drive home from work the other day, I passed a group protesting the war in Iraq. They’re there, diligently, every Monday from 5 pm until 7 pm, flashing peace signs and holding billboards asking us to ‘honk for peace’. I don’t honk for peace. No, like most of the other people in their vehicles, I just want to get home, and honking for peace seems like an inconsequential and futile action.
Does that make me a bad American? Am I un-patriotic? Perhaps, but when a war is going on in a distant country and you don’t know anyone directly involved and it’s been going on for years, it tends to be placed on the backburner. Not that I don’t ever think about it. I mean, every Monday I drive home from work, I see the protesters and I think about the war.
The protesters…you would think in this day and age, it’s the younger, hip generation that’s protesting. The green generation, the children of the hippies. No, in fact the group consisted of mostly the children’s grandparents. My grandma could have been in that crowd protesting and I probably wouldn’t have noticed her. She would have blended right in. I was surprised to see people that old holding protest signs and waving at passersby. Then I started to think, why wouldn’t they be the ones to protest? And the more I thought about it, the more I thought about the fact that those protesters made up part of The War Generation. They’re the ones who have lived through Viet Nam, Korea, and even WWII. They practiced drills for when nuclear war broke out, responding to air raid sirens. They watched their classmates ship out the day after graduation, and watched their brothers and sons go off to war because their draft number came up.
Out of any of us, they have the most right to protest. The war in Iraq has been ongoing since March of 2003. That’s seven years. And honestly, we could spend the rest of time there, trying to get things as close as we can to what we deem as some degree of normalcy. But think about it. The ‘War Against Terror’…why are we fighting in Iraq and in Afghanistan, for that matter? We’re trying to flush out terrorists, to end terrorism. Why are they fighting it? For religious reasons, Jihad and all that. For their hatred of us. We’re not fighting for the same reasons. It’s not like fighting over a piece of land, or a base. We’re fighting beliefs, ideals. We’re fighting a war in which only half of the people involved are fighting for religious reasons. And if you’ve ever seen the Christian Jesus camps where they build warriors for God (check out clips on youtube for ‘Jesus Camp’), then you know that when someone is fighting something in the name of religion, they’ll fight to the death, and cause as much damage as they can while they’re going down.
I’m not saying fighting for something you believe in is bad. In fact, you should fight for what you believe in. But there is a time to realize that you are at an impass with someone, and sometimes, as hard as it is, you just have to walk away. You don’t have to admit defeat. And I know just ‘walking away’ from a war isn’t something you can do easily. But when you’ve been fighting for seven years, and nearly 4500 of your own people have died, while over 31,000 have been injured, it’s time to consider that impass.
I don’t know. The more I think about it, the more I’m considering honking the next time I see The War Generation out there. Maybe letting them know I support them isn’t such a futile action after all.
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