Add to favorites Examiner Bio

Trickle down works all too well, but not with money

(AP Photo, Bullitt Marquez)

Is it ethical to call soldiers who chose to fight and die “brainwashed pawns” as some have done about the men and women who volunteered to go to Iraq and died?

 

Is it more ethical to say that, whatever their beliefs, and however they came by those beliefs, they died in what they believed was service of their country? And therefore, they should be honored.

 

I would ring in on the latter.

 

During the Vietnam War, I was in college. I was a middle-of-the-road sort of college student, neither rabidly liberal, nor wildly conservative. My college was, overall, wildly liberal. However, I sat in the snack bar and talked, often, with the single most rabidly conservative student on campus, a mountain of a man with a wild Irish name who died too young of natural causes. I’ll call him Pat. Two others often joined the discussions, one an Indian grad student who disliked the Brits intensely (Pat was rabidly pro-Brit, despite his Irish surname), the other a Rhodesian (at the time, Zimbabwean now) student who liked the British. Interesting times. I was, in fact, the liberal in that bunch. And I did sit in, just once, during a demonstration. But it wasn’t about the Vietnam War; it was about parking fees behind the Student Union or some such drivel. And I didn’t sit to demonstrate; I sat to talk with my friend, Pat …who was sitting in about whatever unimportant issue it was.

 

The thing is, we never called those who went to war names. None of us did. I eventually married an ex-Army officer who was in grad school there. No one I knew was so hateful as to verbally abuse those who served, either voluntarily or because they had lost their student deferment. No one called me names because I had married a former Army officer. Nor did we castigate conscientious objectors; the man who lived next door to me after I married the Army officer had been a CO in World War II! He taught our dog to take treats nicely; his wife took care of our cat when we went away. Nor did we castigate those who took off for Canada when their deferment ran out. We respected each person's right to his or her own beliefs and way of living those beliefs...or unfortunate necessities, as their lives sometimes were.

 

We were not unusual in any sense in that time and place, except perhaps for the ex-Army officer aspect of it all in my case. But as I said, no one cared. The war was wrong…everyone knew the war was wrong. But everyone knew some people would have to fight. Some went because they hadn’t gone to college and couldn’t find jobs. Some went because they really did believe in the war. Some went because they lost their deferments. Some went, like my husband, because they had been in ROTC in college to help pay the cost of that, and they owed it. Then they used the GI Bill, if they survived, to get advanced degrees.

 

That was a much more civil time, at least in that little pocket of humanity in Binghamton, NY. When Kent State happened, there was a demonstration by students (mainly) down the streets of Binghamton. The cops were there to maintain order, wearing flowers on their uniforms, as I recall. I didn’t march; I just observed, ever and always, I suppose, the journalist. But it was orderly.

 

What's the point of all this? The point is that it was a more civil world back then. We had Johnson, and then Nixon, in the White House back then, so it does seem a little hard to swallow that it was, actually, a kinder, gentler world. It’s hard to believe that Nixon was civilized. After all, he was a thief, or at least, the Fagin to the Watergate burglars. But clearly, he must have been more civilized than George W. Bush. I make that claim because, while trickle-down doesn’t work for finance (when hoarders get it, they keep it, as bankers have recently shown), it does work for an ethos. The attitude at the top is clearly communicated to the population. If they don’t quite hold that ethos in their hearts and souls, at least they will be aware of an atmosphere, for good or ill, being created by the leaders of their nation. Perhaps, actually, trickle-down does work for finance; when those at the top steal and hoard, those lower down the social order know it. There’s just nothing they can do about it, except to become disillusioned and bitter, hateful and sour. And that, most assuredly, much of this nation had done. But we had, at last, become sick of it, and we tossed out the thieves and hoarders, and we are collectively  (at last count, about 70 percent of us who approve of Mr. Obama’s work for the past month) looking for a new ethos.

 

A few soldiers forgot the relatively benign ethos that had developed under Johnson (the Great Society, after all, was his) and remained under Nixon. So, in Ohio, a few soldiers shot peacefully demonstrating students back in 1970. Or maybe they were ill trained and frightened. But the result was an outpouring of Never Again. We didn’t believe in excessive force, as a nation, in those days. Force, yes. But not excessive. And certainly not uncalled for. And we knew Vietnam was, on many fronts, wrong.

 

It seemed as if, during the Bush years, we had come to believe in excessive force, the proverbial atomic flyswatter. We engaged in “Shock and Awe” against sheepherders and Bedouins. We slammed mud huts and caves with ordnance that would bring down a small planet, and achieved less than nothing. And all the while, some among us proclaimed that it was the right thing to do in return for the 3,500 lives lost on 9/11. Others of us knew it was ethically and morally insupportable; after the fact, we learned we had been duped.

 

In retrospect, there are additional things to wonder about concerning the Bush administration's response to what was clearly a horrible act on 9/11. We need to ask how far he would have gone. For instance,  what if those towers had been full, as they would have been if it had been an hour later when the planes struck? What if it had been 50,000 who had died on 9/11 rather than 3,500? Would George W. Bush then have destroyed 35 nations rather than two?

 

I wonder how he would have found so many to scapegoat for our national inability to see what was right before our eyes. I wonder how he would have convinced us that we needed not only to sacrifice our sons and daughters, our Constitution, our way of life, our belief in the rule of law, but our last dime as well to support global war? Those last dimes wouldn’t go to waste, of course; they would go to line the pockets of Halliburton and Blackwater and Exxon, to buy advertising that would convince the gullible among us that it was right for the banks to lose our money and then ask us for more to cover their losses. That it was right to put all our money into tanks and bombers and defective body armor and hiring paid goons to rough up any remaining "enemy combatants" wherever they might lurk, or be lured. But the money, our last dimes, would not be lost, of course. It would all have trickled up to the pockets of the imperial administration and its friends, never to trickle down again.

 

The dual wars in the Middle East consumed our national output. The bankruptcy and credit reform law act of 2005 ensured a nation of slaves to big money. The erosion of our Constitutional rights ensured that we would never be able to agitate for the return of our rights, because to do so would risk the gulag. Few would do it. Few would peacefully demonstrate in the absence of habeas corpus; no one wants their families to wonder, like a bunch of South American peasants in the worst dictatorships, where their loved ones have gone.

 

And yet, although many of us were bankrupted through the collusion of the government in power, the bankers at large with the cash pouches and the necessity of building lives in a crazy marketplace...

Although we were all brainwashed to a point and pistol whipped into submission by a constant barrage of danger alerts (ranging from yellow through orange to red), at length, we managed to elect a decent man to the presidency.

 

All is not lost for the American people and the American republic. But is unethical, and unwise in the extreme, to castigate those whose very bodies were put in the way of mortal danger to preserve us, no matter what real patriotism on their part, or ruse on the part of a skillfully manipulative former government was used to get them there. It is unworthy of a decent people, a people who said a resounding NO to any more antics like those of the ethically tarnished ship of state we endured for eight long years.