Would you give up your Starbucks latte to buy body armor?
I was walking in downtown Minneapolis today and noticed some posters from World War I in the window of a bookshop. One was made up of an illustration of a knife cutting a loaf of bread and the caption was “Save a loaf a week–help win the war”.
Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of posters with that theme of shared sacrifice that were published during World War I and II.
On this 64th anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack it struck me that the first reaction of our country after the attacks of September 11 was not an eloquent call for national resolve, but a reminder that if we didn’t keep spending as usual, the “Terrorists would win.”
The only people making any sacrifice today for our war are the families of the service people who are actually risking their lives in a war neither the administration nor the people of the country want to win enough to actually support in any way more meaningful than a magnetic bumper ribbon.
We do it on the cheap, sending other people’s children to die, while we ask for more tax cuts. We send too few troops with inadequate equipment into the wrong country, while we build bike trails in Minnesota, highways to nowhere in Alaska, and send millions in Homeland Security appropriations to Cheney’s home state of Wyoming just in case Al Queda decides to fly a plane into the Grand Tetons.
As long as we do that, every date since September 11, 2001 will be remembered, by me at least, as a date which will live in infamy.
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