http://atwar.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/its-the-economy-undergraduate/
I read this article today, and found it rather disheartening. Perhaps I hold a personal bias, knowing not one, but two men who, in a few short months, will be deployed to these wars that have seemed to have dropped completely from our radar as we stress over the economy and health care reform. It is not that these domestic causes are unworthy of our attention. It is merely that we forget that we are at war at our peril.
I won't be counting this as an official blog post for the week, though I will end with a question: how often do you, personally, think about, or talk about, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and should we be having a louder, bigger public dialogue about them?
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I must admit that I give little thought to the wars our military is currently engaged in on a daily basis, and my weekly frequency may not be much better than that. The nature of our system of government allows us to live our lives without having to divert our attention to the many issues facing our nation in both the foreign and domestic spheres. There is a virtue to this representative form of government that affords its citizens some level of ignorance in these matters; it allows us to ignore these situations when it is convenient for us to do so, and thereby carry on with our day-to-day lives.
ReplyDeleteAlthough I may not think about the wars on a daily basis, I have given them a serious amount of thought on both an ideological and a practical level. I think that such critical analysis of foreign and domestic events is something that should be practiced by every American citizen, along with keeping up on current events, who wishes to have an impact on how the country is run. I think the quality of these analyses and subsequent debates are far more important than the frequency of them.