BOMB SADDAM!!!

The War On Iraq:

March 17, what a day.

My alarm rings. Buzz. Beeep. Buzz. Beeep. Buzz. My hand gropes around for the digital clock that is stuck in between the mattress and wooden siding of the top bunk. The alarm serves no other purpose but to annoy me to the point where I must physically be conscious enough to wake up and turn it off.

Grope. Buzz. Feel. Beeep. Slide. Buzz. Click. Silence. These are the sounds that echo in my mind at a point in time between 7:30 and 7:31 in the morning. All this effort, thought, movement and finally...

I hear the voice of a disc jockey talking about something dealing with Iraq. The man signs off into commercial, identifying the station as Urbana’s home of rock. Mid sentence his voice is silenced. Jamey finally gets around to shutting him the hell up from the bottom bunk. His alarm clock is a lot more fancier than mine. It has two separate alarms and a radio and therefore can be three times as annoying per day.

It is now 8:15. I get up, make my way over to my closet, open the door and change from my t-shirt and shorts into some clean clothes. I grab my backpack and make my way over to Physics 111 lecture to learn about 2 bodies in collisions.

The reality is that I never do get out of bed. I never go to Physics class to listen to my professor lecture on applications of Newton’s laws. I don’t even have clean clothes. Instead I crawl out of bed at around 11:30 and check FARK.com.

And there it is.

“U.S., Britain and Spain withdraw Iraq resolution at UN. Bush to address country tonight”

Source: MSNBC, with a scrolling “NEWS FLASH” animated gif along the side. America is finally going to do it. We are going to start bombing Baghdad. We are going to war. I read the article, scroll through the flames in the comments board and post a thought of my own. Lots of people are saying that there must be another way other than war. Others say that regardless, we should still support our military. Still others want nothing short of turning Iraq into a radioactive wasteland.

Jeff sends me a quote from our Vice President. Something to the effect of “since when do we care what the French think?” I think the better question would be: Since when do we care what our Vice President thinks? It’s all about Dubya these days.

Then I head off to lunch. Lunch is terrible as usual. The hamburgers look limp and undercooked as usual. The buns look stale. I grab some French Fries, or as one of our genius senator’s calls them “Freedom Fries”. I opt against the hamburger and make myself a sandwich. My “Freedom Fries” taste like shit.

Then it’s off to Chemistry lecture. It’s hotter than hell in there. I know I won’t be able to pay attention so I pull my Nietzsche book out of my backpack and begin reading. Amazingly, he has a few words to say about war:

"One can say against war that it makes the victor stupid and the vanquished malicious. in favor of war, one can say that it barbarizes through both these effects and thus makes man more natural; war is sleep or wintertime of culture: man emerges from it with more strength, both for the good and for the bad."

I actually get to finish my chapter before lecture is over. I’m still sweating a storm in my sweater. I begin to wish that I had done laundry over the weekend. What really sets me on edge is when I get outside and find it’s cooler outside than in.

The next hour flies by, and then so does the next hour of class. Leaving math class, four of us discuss the entire Iraq/United Nations situation. The feelings are all mutual, we should be at war with them. After 12 years and 16 separate refusals from Iraq to abide by the United Nations guidelines, the path that must be taken cannot be possibly any clearer: War. Diplomacy doesn’t work, and to let Iraq continue to ignore the resolutions set forth by the UN would be showing a sign of weakness in the part of the United States.

Fuck hippies. Pave France. Bomb Saddam. These are the slogans that sing in the minds of the silent majority of Americans. God bless us as we vanquish the evil upon the face of the earth. May they be shown mercy after we send them to Hell. Who cares what the rest of the world thinks when it comes to international policy? Since when did the United States have to ask for permission to do anything?

I think the term “never” would sum that up. We gave England the bird as we dumped their tea in our harbors. We’ve told our own citizens that humans can no longer be treated as property. That didn’t set to well with a select region, so we had to fight a war to free these former cattle so they could have the status of “human being” (although some of those very people we freed seem to have forgotten this and still want more fucking money from the government because their ancestors were too weak to stick up for themselves and had to have the government do it for them). Then we had to go and save France and the rest of Europe from Germany... twice. And we single-handedly stopped the “Red Threat” of communism during the Cold War. And these are just the highlights of our government’s “we don’t give a fuck, we’re going to do what we want anyway” policies and politics.

And some people still think that dragging a giant gray phallus with an anti-war slogan on the side will change the very mind of the same administration that passed The Patriot Act, which basically pisses on the Constitution and then dances on the graves of our founding fathers. I love the utter genius that we American citizens posses. We think that the government actually gives a damn about what the individual thinks, says and does. We like to tell ourselves that our opinion matters, that what we feel is important should be in the minds of everyone. We like to think we are special little flowers that the President, Cabinet, Congress and world leaders have a special affection for and will always choose us over reason and logic. We want to believe that just because we put them in office that they will conform to our very wishes like a child molds a wad of Playdoh.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but here is a little dose of reality: The government doesn’t care what you think!

Amazing, I know, but trust me here, I’m right for once. Wake up out of this ignorant state of mind you have and see the truth. The government doesn’t give a damn about what you think is important. The government is going to look out for their own personal interests. Do you know what the role of our government really is?

The role of the government is to ensure that its citizens can live a life in pursuit of happiness.

How can I possibly be happy knowing that Iraq has biological, chemical and nuclear weapons that can kill other people? How can I be happy when I have lousy “Freedom Fries” for lunch? How can I be happy when terrorists are crawling all over the country just waiting to strike? The better question is: can I ever really be happy?

No. I can’t be happy.

And neither can you, or Bush, or Saddam, or anyone. Nobody can be happy all the time, because we all can’t just do what we want without stepping on someone else’s toes. It just isn’t human to get along with everyone. What’s the point of life if there is never any conflict? What’s the point of God without the Devil? And why should Saddam be allowed to have his weapons of mass destruction without any consequence?

I’ll be damned if Saddam is going to be happy while myself and the rest of the country lives in perilous fear of terrorist attacks. I’d be upset of Bush and his administration wasn’t out there waging this war on terror. The way I look at it, the good Commander in Chief is doing his job: keeping our nation safe no matter the cost.

And yes, this cost does include the cost of human life. Foremost, the life of our soldiers who are more likely to end up dead from friendly fire than from an Iraqi nerve gas bomb. This will be the only real “cost” of human life during the war. If one single American dies, it will be tragic. If a quarter of a million Iraqi babies, mothers, and children were to die, they would just be a statistic. Harsh? You bet. They aren’t Americans, and therefore not human. Besides, you’ve got some “Freedom Fries” that taste like crap in the cafeteria that need to be addressed before we start to fret over petty details of something happening overseas.

Am I really this uncaring? Maybe, but I’m an American first and a Humanitarian last. It’s a nation eat nation world out there. If we don’t stay on top of things, there could be consequences. Japan could begin to edge us out of the electronics market, the price of gasoline could go up again, and our children’s minds could be warped by FOX’s sleazy low brow programming.

Right now our nation is divided, but I can understand why. People don’t want to just follow the government. Oh no, they would rather bitch, whine, complain and moan about it. It’s a whole lot more trendy and easier to do. It makes us feel good about ourselves when we can say “I am holier than my own evil, corrupt and baby killing government.” What better way to show your patriotism than to call your own President by the name of “Hitler” and urinate on his effigy?

Maybe we as a people don’t have anything better to do with our time. Like solving real domestic problems like hunger in the inner cities. More children will die of hunger in our own country this year than will die by our bombs in Iraq. You want to cry for something? Try crying for your own citizens for once. Whose side are you on anyway? Terrorist.

But I’m sure this will all be really great in retrospect. We’ll probably get this war over really quick, if you can even call it a war. If anything it will be a skirmish, or a really big game of Missile Command. In either case, I’m sure that March Madness will have our nation too distracted to care about much else.

In the end though, everything I’m writing here doesn’t matter a bit. I’m just some 18 year old guy with an opinion who happened to waste some of his study time to write and vent about a link he read on the internet. I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind and opinions about the war. And even more importantly, my life will go on as usual as it has before the seeing Bush’s national address, giving Saddam 48 hours to get the hell outta Dodge.

People will go to their classes. They will watch their movies. They will talk casually over the water coolers at work. They will commute from point A to point B. They will eat their “Freedom Fries” and complain about how the salt shaker is empty. They will worry more about getting that plane ticket. They will play their video games. And our government couldn’t ask any more of us, than to do just that: nothing of any importance or relevance. Just live out your unimportant existence in the pursuit of happiness.