WWII, on the other hand, looked more like everybody's dad or big brother. Like the guys in uniforms saluting each other on the streets downtown. Like WAACS and WAVES (who also looked a lot like Wonder Woman).
I was a little young to be in the Army but that doesn't mean I wasn't in the war. We were all in the war. We picked up newspapers in Red Flyer wagons, saved the tinfoil from gum wrappers, and took the bacon fat back to the butcher. (Except for some bacon fat my Mom used to help the war effort by making soap. It was brownish, evil smelling stuff and in Lincoln, Nebraska - to us - it was a whole lot more dangerous than the Germans.) Food and gasoline and tires were rationed and bubble gum was in short supply (the rumor was they needed it to make more tires). And even now I can page through old Life magazines from the early 40s and see pictures I remember seeing then.
And hung in the windows were little banners with blue and gold stars.
We won.
But we haven't done too well with wars since then. There's the War on Poverty that's been going on for how long now? Thirty years or so? And we don't seem to have won that one yet. And a War on Drugs - I don't know if we're winning that one or not but if we're winning we sure are winning slow. And this War on Terror (or Terrorism, or Just General Badness) which is only just now getting started and could be going on for quite some time. (And also there's been a "police action," a "conflict," various "interventions" and "incursions," and something about rescuing some college students on an island somewhere. None of them seem to have accomplished very much except getting a lot of people killed.)
My thinking is, on the whole, we'd be better off if we hadn't had so many wars.
(Edited 1.11. Mercifully)
Technorati Tags: Miscellany
No comments:
Post a Comment