What is wrong with us?Where did we get this idea that withdrawal without the enemy's surrender is an honorable way out? Where did we get this idea that leaving an entire nation in the hands of a bunch of bloodthirsty medieval savages was a good idea? Where did we get this idea that if we retreat and come home and just play nice with everybody, then all the mean kids will like us and we won't have to go to war anymore?Where do we come up with this stuff?Since when has despair become the fashionable outlook? Since when is "I wanna go home!" an effective battle cry? Since when is not killing our enemies more important than defeating them? Since when does taking out a blood-stained dictator make us just as bad as them? Since when does a pluralistic society rank lower on the moral scale than a misogynistic, racist, fundamentalist ideology?Since when?How come when they hijack our airliners and knock down our buildings and kill thousands of our innocent civilians, we sit around for years wondering what we did to make them angry? How come the world's foremost military and political machine behaves like a battered wife? How come we consider deliberate self-defeat a noble course of action? How come our own citizens think that our free and open society is more fascist and oppressive than a government that beat women for showing a little bit of ankle - Afghanistan - or a government that right now has a man on trial for his life on the charge that he tore a page in the Qu'ran - Pakistan - or a government that refuses to let its citizens own a holy text or build a place or worship for a religion other than its own radical strain of Islam - Saudi Arabia?How come people don't see that we're better than them?How come people aren't willing to fight to make sure we stay that way?I think John Stuart Mill said it best when he said that "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse." We have come to a point in our history where our decades of ease and prosperity have made us numb to the fact that our comfortable way of life was bought with the blood of hundreds of thousands of men. We have become morally lazy, to the point where we believe the outrage and the calamity of wars outside our borders will have no physical effect on us. We have ceased to appreciate that for our way of life to survive, we must be willing to stand against those who would seek to destroy it - and we must be willing, especially in this case, to squash their "freedom fighters" like the cockroaches they are. To attempt anything less is folly, and to pretend otherwise is madness. Yet our best and brightest find themselves entangled in a hypermoralistic web of xenocentric philosophy that has no place for such outmoded tropes as honor, duty and the knowledge of good and evil.What on earth is wrong with us?
Joanna Lees is a senior journalism major and writes 'The Scenic Route' for the Daily News. Her views do not necessarily agree with those of the newspaper.
Write to Joanna at jllees@bsu.edu.
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