We had it all figured out. Born after Vietnam, we were the first American generation in the last century to never know a prolonged war. We convinced ourselves that if we just learned our history well enough, we would not be doomed to repeat it. How wrong we were.
We visited Holocaust museums, had college roommates of different races, signed commitments to diversity, and spent spring break in Third World countries building orphanages. If only the prosperity that funded such an education could have funded peace. Unfortunately, it could not.
As college students, we read Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History and the Last Man,” presented as a guide book for a post-war world, and preaching that just around the corner awaited “Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Just a decade after we affirmed such an optimistic proclamation, it has become a symbol of a peaceful era we no longer know.
When Sept. 11 happened, we were told to spend more, and so we did. We gobbled up first homes, and bought our SUVs with zero down. We attended fancy schools on government grants, almost convincing ourselves we weren’t at war. On our wedding days, we only briefly considered the awkward self-indulgence of a champagne toast while others tasted war just an ocean away. I am as guilty as the next.
We waved our American flags proudly, but then as war became a bit more complicated, we became angry. Our friends came back from Iraq changed men, and others still came home in body bags. In our lives, this was not what war had looked like. After all, Ronald Reagan had brought down Communism without ever firing a shot, and fighter jets had freed Kuwait.
Shocked and dismayed by world events, we attempted to blame a single man – George W. Bush – for the fate we found ourselves in. We blamed him for the rise of Islamo-Fascism in South Asia and the Middle East, unrest in the Palestinian territories, and today we blame him for terrorism around the world.
We refuse to see that while we were busy reading Fukuyama on university lawns, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, Hamas, and Hezbollah were all preparing to wage a world war on Western values.
How could it be, we wondered, that even after all of our degrees, all of our study, and all of our peace, we could not decide when and why America should – or must – go to war? If we had just gotten everyone around a table to talk, couldn’t we have worked this out like civilized adults?
While we liked the idea of taking down murderous dictators like Saddam Hussein, we couldn’t decide if that was a justification for war. While we loved driving our SUVs to Starbucks to buy $4 lattes, we balked at the idea of going to war to protect our oil resources around the world. While Iran and North Korea developed their nuclear arsenals, we hosted peace protests. We held our heads in our hands, unable to grasp that things were just a little more complicated than we’d led ourselves to believe.
Like every previous generation, we are finally being forced to realize that freedom and peace cannot be preserved without great sacrifice. My father spent his early childhood with his father at war more days than he was home. My mother’s father, riddled with shrapnel from his time in the South Pacific, forever hid his scars under a quiet exterior and long white cotton shirts. They never complained.
We must choose: We can have prosperity, but we cannot have it for free. We can have oil, but it comes at a cost. We can have peace, but only if we destroy those who will not tolerate it.
We can be the world’s hegemon, but we cannot also then expect to win the love and admiration of our international peers. We must answer the fundamental question: When and why should we go to war?
I hope and pray my daughter will not be a wartime bride. Perhaps the epidemic will spare her generation. I will teach her, however, that she cannot expect peace. It is far from the norm of the human experience; it must be earned through blood and sacrifice.
Jessica Peck Corry (jessica@i2i.org) is a policy analyst with the Independence Institute in Golden, where she specializes in higher education, civil rights and land-use policy.
