A little less than nine months into 2010, we are already experiencing the bloodiest year for the American military in Afghanistan. As Stalin is said to have keenly observed, the death of many is a statistic while the death of one is a tragedy (leaving us with 358 individual American tragedies this year to date in Operation Enduring Freedom). And yet, that statistic seemed to pass without remark, without much protest or fanfare. And let's not forget the significantly higher number of innocent Afghans caught in the crossfire.
I'm sure a few students at Wesleyan are outraged, but that is merely their profession. Where is the outrage provided by people who are professional humans rather than professional protestors? At Dartmouth, this event has slipped by us completely. I imagine this is because, literally, we can afford not to pay attention. The soldiers and civilians who die, however, simply can't pay that price.
During the wholesale slaughter of the Vietnam War, the lives of all young American men even, to some extent, of the wealthy were threatened. But today, because the army is a "volunteer" force (meaning, often enough, "those who are forced by financial necessity to fight"), the majority of young middle and upper-class Americans can follow the war the same way one follows a football game. There is no question of one's own mortality, of one's own soul, being involved in the struggle. The things that occupy us are dining hall renovations, grumbling about how terrifying Jersey Shore is (whilst still consuming it avidly) and speculating idly on such sundry issues as "facetime." War is a private ventureunobtrusive, smoothly managed. The publicespecially the "elite" segment of society, of which Dartmouth is representativecan't be concerned.
I don't pretend to be an expert on military or political affairs, but it still seems odd to me that students aren't raising an outcry against the Obama administration's calamitous war policy. This year, in particular, has accounted for over a quarter of all American deaths in Afghanistan since the war began. Doesn't it seem disquieting to you that no one is really talking about this? I think the last protest I remember seeing at Dartmouth was a protest against Israel's stand on the Gaza situation about two years ago. (And Israel is, of course, a foreign power that doesn't exactly pay attention to college students in Northern New England.) And, of course, the Iraq War is still a live issue, despite its death in popular imagination.
Has the cultivation of our own garden actually ceased to interest us? Thomas Jefferson said that the tree of liberty must continually be refreshed with the blood of tyrants and patriots. But it seems that in Afghanistan, the blood of many people has refreshed nothing save the tree of a perpetually renewed tyranny. And in our own country, what has such brutal struggle against wicked leaders in foreign lands caused? It seems that our blood won't refresh such infertile ground; and not a tiny bit of interest, among the student body, in all of this no signs of life.
This seems to me a difficult column to write. It's difficult because it has to do with what's not happening rather than what is happening. We go about our lives. We recognize that there is a war being escalated by a president whom we all expected to do the exact opposite, and we privately remark that it is a pity. Waves of electrical anesthetic wash over our land, immersing the privileged classes, while violence strikes like a sudden pulse of heat lightening in the darkened and undeveloped quarters of the world. It's a shame a private shame. And you'd think there would've already been an op-ed in The Dartmouth, criticizing the student body for failing to react to an event so salient as an increasingly brutal war. But, strangely enough I just find it curious.
I would like to propose a solution to this widespread apathy: universal conscription, a draft that pulls in everyone. If we, the so-called "elite," are faced with the prospect of our own demise in fields of fire, we will naturally react by preventing future unnecessary wars. And if we don't have the wisdom to do that, what's the worst that can happen? We all diewhich really isn't that big of a loss, considering that we wouldn't have bothered to do anything useful with our lives in the first place, lacking the aforementioned wisdom.
Obviously, that's facetious. But it would be interesting to see some signs of life some proof against the wasteland.
