The future that was stolen from us.

Sorry for the long delay in posting. Was on the road last week to the land of milk and honey and also had a fair amount of work to do. I have been taking a lot of time to do some thinking both forward and back, when a decision is approaching that you have dreaded, don’t want to make, but know you will have to. It put  a crimp on the idea of writing, especially from my laptop.

Tomorrow will be the 100th anniversary of the 11th hour of the 11th month of the 18th year and the end of a long and terrible war that killed millions and upset the world order for the next century and probably the century to come. It created the pre-conditions of the next terrible war, which killed even more millions, and created the most terrible weapons known to man.

Tomorrow is Veterans Day in the United States, the day we are supposed to honor living Veterans for their service. In Great Britain and the Commonwealth it will be Remembrance Sunday where they will honor all those who died in Britain’s many struggles, partially derived from its own empire and partially derived from the struggle to keep madmen from taking over and creating an evil empire.

Finally, it was Homecoming at my beloved Alma Mater, and people were heading of their respective reunions. Thinking back to when I was in my Senior Year- and so full of idealism and hope for the future – well, that was just the icing on a cake of a sea of frustration I am feeling right now. 

I too, like many people will put up a picture of me in uniform. Unlike some, however, this year the posting of such a picture will not be the totally joyous act of pride that it appears to be for some. Because, and especially in view of the events of the last two years, I can’t help but keep asking myself: “What was it all for? What if anything, did we really accomplish? Where is better and safer world we were supposed to striving for?“

Sure, for many of us, myself included, the military was a fair trade. We got skills, excitement, friends, and adventures in exchange for a paycheck and the distinct possibility of dying in the line of duty. But it was supposed to be for a purpose, for the hope of a better and saner world where our children would not have to waste the resources on conflict and could use them instead for achievement. The events of the last 25 years have shown us just how screwed up that line of thinking was – especially the last 10 years. 

Technology-wise many great inventions have been created. We carry now in our pockets a marvelous communication device, through which we have an axis of the world’s knowledge,  and by which we have really heated and pointless arguments with strangers over our twisted American politics. And too, we have lot of great breakthroughs that expanded the length and quality of life. We just, as a country, have yet to figure out a way to economically pay for them or provide them to all of our citizens irrespective of yearly income or employment status.  And too, somehow after a 100 years, we still have massive pockets of misery and poverty around the world and the supposedly “great powers” have still not figured out a way to put an end to it. In the world of Star Trek, Earth finds a way to banish poverty, war, disease from the planet in a century.  In the real universe, it seems to me that we will never find a way to do it. Now mind you, in both visions of the world, the resources are present to accomplish improvements, but in the real world – especially in America –  the will to do so is most assuredly absent.

That was NOT the future that was supposed to be ahead of us when we raised our hands, oh so many years ago. We were children in the age of the 60’s,  where it still seemed America could accomplish anything. We knew that because America had gone to the moon. The technology was going to save us, and the dream of eliminating, or at least dramatically reducing poverty in America was not laughed at as it is today. Sure there were some pretty scary things too -especially in the early 70’s as Vietnam spiraled down to its tragic end. But most of us felt we were going to be part of something great, that were were in fact “exceptional” and were part of a movement defending freedom.

As it turned out we weren’t doing that. The country we had sworn to serve allied itself with dictators and it made unsavory deals that were perceived to be in our best national interests and basically acted just like any of those once great European powers that we all looked down our noses at.  Interestingly enough, unburdened by the cost of the many wars the US had to fight between 1979 and today, they were able to make some small progress on some issues, until the seeds of that terrible conflict in 1918 finally had sprung forth their terrible fruit and they had to deal with new problems, as did we.

And in the end, what of the world of 2018 and the first 20% of the 21st Century? We can’t really say the world is any better or safer now – in fact it actually feels much more dangerous. What happened to the that bright future with healthier lives, more leisure time, greater stability and a gradual progress towards peace, worldwide?

Charles Pierce, one of my favorite current writers asked a similar question when penned an essay entitled, “How Can We Believe in this America?”. A long time believer in the idea of political commonwealth he asked the same questions I am asking today:

We owe each other a debt and we owe each other an obligation, and because of these fundamental American imperatives, there are things that we own in common with each other, and that we are obliged to protect for our posterity. The water. The trees. The wild places in the land. We lose sight of these truths sometimes. Acceleration is the great danger. We lost sight of these truths during the Industrial Age, when the accelerated pace of new manufacturing caught the country by surprise. It was only the long, slow rise of progressive politics that brought these basic truths back to the national mind, and we got the national parks out of it. We have lost sight of these truths again, in the Information Age, when even more accelerated technologies caught us by surprise. It is an open question still whether we will be able to recover that which we have forgotten.

I can’t help but feel in the years since he wrote those words, the acceleration has gotten worse.  Certainly, in the last few years, the rise of demagogues has led the re-creation of the same destructive nationalism that gave rise to the First World War in the beginning.

Our service, my service, was – while indeed a trade-off I was willing to make –  was also supposed to be about accomplishing something in the service of a greater cause and building a better tomorrow for myself and my children. The sad history of our current time is that we have done anything but. And now I am at the fall, turning into winter of my life, having to accept the knowledge that we gave our lives to a service that accomplished little if anything that we hoped to see achieved.

Again, I will ask the question, “What was it all for? And who stole that better  world and future from us?” The answer to the first question I certainly do not know – but I do know it was not for what the United States of America has become in the last two years, if not more accurately,  the last 10 years. No, it was not for that. And if it was, then I have wasted the better part of my life on a fool’s errand.

As for the second question, well we know the who those villains are. They are the deadly sins listed in the bible – summed up for Americans by one word: selfishness. Somewhere along the way, we stopped caring about making the country as a whole better and bringing the rest of the world along with us.  We were getting ours and as for the “other people” – well screw them. They are just lazy moochers anyway. That makes me extremely sad and despairing. It was never supposed to be like this.

Yes, its a different world with new technology. Interestingly, however, much of the technology now is not that big a change from the world of the 60’s. Sure we can communicate worldwide now in an instant, but that is just a linear progression from the technological breakthroughs of the post World War II era. And as we were again grimly reminded this week and last, it has a dark side too. But in a lot of ways we never made the mighty breakthroughs we thought were just around the corner.  It’s still 12 hours to fly to Japan and supersonic passenger travel is just a distant memory. The beautiful space planes and planetary travel of the movie 2001 do not yet exist. And probably worst of all, while a child born today may live to be over a 100 with ease, the truth is, where he was born and who he was born to will make that determination.  Far more than any doctor or scientist will. And if he is born in the wrong place, he may very well struggle – at great risk-for almost all of those years. 

By blindly accepting that reality or worse yet, cheer-leading the bad forces that enable it, we dishonor the service of those men who fought and died in the so called Great War and all the Wars that came after. That’s wrong. We owe them and their descendants something much, much, better.

I’ll close with my favorite line from one of my favorite books:

Either War is Finished or We Are.  

As I wrote a few years ago on Memorial Day 2014 :

Yes, it is a piece from an American novel, with a British slant. However,  I think if you try, you can substitute American battles, American names, and American cities and see the analogies to our present day. It is true that not all of the comparisons are apt-the Soviet Union is no more and it is pretty clear socialism has been discredited-however substitute “Globalization and rampant unregulated profit taking” and Tudsbury’s prediction holds true. And I would also point out – as much as so many people try to deny it, whatever we Americans have in the way of honor and virtue, we learned it from the British.

If we seek to honor the sacrifices of the brave Soldiers, Sailors, Airman and Marines who have fallen today-we must also ask ourself what are we doing to make this country a better place to live for their children and their families. For in the end, that was what they were fighting to defend, a free society that improves itself, not simply falls back into the evils they fought so hard to protect us from.

Andrew Bacevich wrote recently:

Americans once believed war to be a great evil. Whenever possible, war was to be avoided. When circumstances made war unavoidable, Americans wanted peace swiftly restored.

Present-day Americans, few of them directly affected by events in Iraq or Afghanistan, find war tolerable. They accept it. Since 9/11, war has become normalcy. Peace has become an entirely theoretical construct. A report of G.I.s getting shot at, maimed, or killed is no longer something the average American gets exercised about. Rest assured that no such reports will interfere with plans for the long weekend that Memorial Day makes possible.

You should find that trend very scary-I know I do.