Oct. 26 brought us the news that we have finally hit the 2,000 mark for the number of American soldiers killed in Iraq.
Wow! Two thousand! Two grand! It's a bi-millennial celebration.
If soldiers only weighed a pound, we'd have literally lost a ton of soldiers. Actually, it's probably closer to 180 tons worth of dead soldiers, but that just doesn't have the same ring to it.
In September, Americans encountered what appeared to be the largest protest of the war thus far. It came in the form an estimated 100,000 people marching past the White House shouting, "Peace now!" and carrying "Bush lied, thousands died" signs.
Unfortunately, President George W. Bush wasn't home.
Strangely enough, those 100,000 people didn't make nearly as much of an impact on the American public as one 48-year-old woman did a month earlier. Cindy Sheehan, whose son was killed in Iraq, camped outside Bush's vacation home in Crawford, Texas, and refused to leave until she got an explanation from the president himself for why her son was dead.
Now, by ranting her conspiracy theories to numerous interviewers, Sheehan has managed to crush any credibility she might have had along with the notion that protesters aren't crazy people.
It's no wonder we don't see young people leading these protests like we did during the Vietnam War. The anti-war voices that are supposed to represent the people against this war are all one-minded radicals like Michael Moore and Sheehan. They have a bunch of demands but no solutions to any of the problems.
The first major protest of the Vietnam War came in December 1964. About 25,000 people showed up, and it was the largest anti-war protest that had taken place in America - and much of the crowd was composed of people our age.
At that point in the Vietnam War, there were 23,300 American soldiers who had been sent to fight and only 376 deaths. The American military had been in South Vietnam for 10 years.
We have now hit the 2.5-year mark since entering Iraq, and there are currently 139,500 American soldiers "over there" - more than 15,000 have been wounded, and more than 2,000 have been killed. It wasn't until 3.5 years into the Vietnam War that more than 100 lives were lost in a single month. We reached that point in Iraq after our first year. We almost reached it for the fourth time last month with 96.
The Vietnam and Iraq wars are similar in that they both started out with a small percentage of the American population vehemently opposed to them, both involved "Team America" acting as world police, and both were entered without an exit strategy. The difference between the two wars, in respect to American soldiers, is that soldiers in Vietnam were drafted into the army while the soldiers in Iraq went on their own accord.
This is why we don't see as many young faces at the anti-war protests these days. The crowds are all parents of dead soldiers and left-wingers who were there all along.
But could there be a deeper issue? Could the absence of young protesters be a testament to the apathy of our generation?
People our age, whether they signed up for it or not, are dying on a daily basis. They are dying faster and in greater numbers than they did in Vietnam - and for a more questionable cause. I don't think the mothers of the 2,000 dead American soldiers should have been the first people to protest this war.
Oh, and by the way ... make that 2,037 dead.
Write to Tim at
sigep363s@yahoo.com
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