Some thoughts on bringing the troops home…

Lately I have been wondering if all the furor about the war in Iraq is really all about the war, or if it’s about something else entirely once you dig underneath the surface of the shouting.

The news feels so full of folks yelling (or at least speaking at very elevated decibel levels) that if we’d just “pull out of the war and bring our American soldiers home,” everything would be all right again.

And I assume we’ve all grown accustomed by now to the frequent allegations by various talking heads that the “war on terrorism” is actually the creation and the fault of the United States. After all, these pundits assure us, 9/11 would not have happened if we would have just behaved ourselves better in the world at large and amongst ourselves in our own country. Furthermore, these experts tell us that we are the ones who created the circumstances that enraged the terrorists (or insurgents, as the, uh, “holy warriors” prefer to self-identify, and heaven knows that in this country it is very important that we follow all self-identification wishes of all persons at all times! But that is a post for another day…)

Now I am not here to justify or take strong positions on who should have engaged in which war at what time, and what intelligence was actionable and what was not. Frankly, it appears to me that unless I was one of the select few who actually saw and was supposed to have read aforementioned intelligence reports, then I probably don’t have enough information to shout loudly and with great authority. Of course, it appears that many of these pundits remain blissfully unencumbered by my particular belief about this, so hence the overcrowded news channels with everybody yelling down the last person’s opinion. As a former nanny, I can say that this would be hilarious entertainment if it involved children, but since the persons involved appear to have reached at least physical adult maturity, I find it all very unfunny and embarrassing as a human being. But I digress.

(But while I am still digressing, the last couple of years have reminded me that the national pastime of this country’s politicians appears to be Monday-morning quarterbacking from their easy, comfortable, and favorite leather armchair, sustained by excellent snacks of various sorts. Your tax dollars at work.)

But all digressions aside, I am here to wonder aloud about a couple of things that are perhaps helping to drive our national obsession with and shrill shouting matches over the war in which we currently find ourselves engaged. First, we are a people and a country that loves reinventing ourselves. No matter what product is on our collective supermarket shelves, we find a way to market a “new and improved” version within 6 months. We love stories about second, third, and fourth chances for people who find themselves in a bad place in their lives and are able to climb out of it with ingenuity, possibly a helping hand from others, and a dash of luck. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the incredible popularity of Oprah Winfrey’s TV program; she is known for highlighting ordinary people who manage to thrive and succeed in spite of very challenging circumstances.

The American dream teaches us that nothing is impossible for us, and we can achieve anything we want if we’ll just put our minds to it and try hard enough. This includes the deeply-rooted belief that we can change ourselves. Walk into any bookstore and you’ll be virtually assaulted with all the self-help titles that promise to assist you first in accepting your problem and then immediately embarking with you on the journey that will change whatever your bad habit/relationship/job/politics/personal scumminess might be.

The unstated but obvious conclusion here is that we seem to have a deep national commitment to the idea that people can change. One of the biggest motivators behind the substantial push throughout our entire national history to “go west, young man” was the hope that in trying again, things could be different this time. Riding shotgun right along with that deep-seated belief in the possibility of change is a comfortable feeling of control over one’s own destiny. If in fact you can always choose to change, then you can always experience a comfortable level of personal control over your own destiny…or so it would appear that we believe.

I would argue that part of why we so vociferously claim that if we as a country would only do X, then the insurgents would do Y, and then the conclusion would be a happy Z of peace throughout the world, is that we are terrified almost beyond comprehension to acknowledge that we have come up against something over which we have no personal control. As long as we believe that if we would just immediately change our foreign policy, or elect a different President, or somehow make our elected politicians mind the peoples’ business and not their personal haircuts, we retain a sense of control.

But as soon as we acknowledge the possibility that the terrorists are, in fact, autonomous beings operating on their own system of belief which may in fact have led them to make all the same decisions regarding jihad no matter what we may have, should have, or should not have done differently, we lose our footing. In some ways, it’s easier for us to self-blame, because then we still retain control of the problem (“if we would have done this differently, then the end result would have been different”) and we still believe we can emerge from it if we will just change our behavior, our attitudes, our response, or whatever it is that we’ve identified as being the problem that initially caused the terrorists such great and uncontrollable anger that the war on terror simply had to start due to our provocation.

I have sometimes wondered if the almost irrational hatred of the current president by some otherwise reasonable folks (the hatred which appears to have begun flowering in earnest following decisions President Bush made in the aftermath of 9/11) has less to do with him and more to do with us. When wracked by fear, often the first thing a human does is lash out, and since there are no terrorists (uh, “insurgents”) dropping by for tea so we can vent our feelings, “get it all out there,” and mediate a difficult but ultimately successful conclusion, preferably with an excellent therapist present to hear out both sides and assure us that we are both justified in our feelings and behaviorial choices, our anger becomes fixated on the person or situation who is available for us to blame. (And let’s be honest, the President is such an easy scapegoat. Most of us are not involved in a day-to-day personal relationship with him, so we don’t have to ever own up to the incredibly incendiary, quite bigoted, and often highly uneducated things we say about him. We never have to confront him face-to-face with our opinions, so it’s very easy for us to shoot off at the mouth and say terrible things about him that we’d never, ever say about another human being with whom we had any relationship. Our cowardice in using the President as easy pickings because he’s such an obvious national figurehead is completely uncalled-for, in my opinion. But I am once again digressing….)

I would posit, however, that there is a second reason besides our frantic fear of loss of control that makes the war in Iraq such a highly charged topic: the twin ideas of entitlement and gratitude. For starters, I seem to come from a generation that feels quite entitled a good bit of the time. Many members of my generation appear to believe that the good life is in fact owed to them, and if for any reason that good life isn’t materializing at the rate they expected it, or if the life that is showing up is filled with challenges and uncertainties (such as what the war on terror inevitably brings us), we once again begin blaming whatever seems handy. We believe we are owed a peaceful, pleasant, financially comfortable existence, and if it isn’t showing up in the way and during the time period we expected it, we become certain that someone or something has badly victimized us.

Now let’s say this person who is accustomed to always living and thinking as though the rest of the world owes them something has a cataclysmic event occur. Somebody they’ve never met before willingly lays down their life so that they can continue to enjoy their own life as they know it in safety. Suddenly their world has been knocked upside down, and they are left with the knowledge that far from them being owed something, they now owe something they can never, ever repay. And that knowledge is antithetical to their worldview. It completely challenges their (frequent) self-identification as a victim instead of a person that now owes society a powerful debt; that of attempting to live a life worthy of that kind of selfless sacrifice.

That sacrifice now demands from the recipient individual a response that is the opposite of entitlement: gratitude. And I think that some of us are so uncomfortable with the concept of permanently owing somebody or something else this deep well of gratitude that we will stand on street corners and shout “bring our troops home now!” rather than examine our profound unwillingness to be perceived as being in anyone else’s debt. I wonder whether part of our frantic need to “bring our troops home now!” has more to do with our unwillingness to live in someone else’s debt (the knowledge that our soldiers are fighting for us in ways we can never repay) and our unwillingness to stop being the victim and start being the grateful beneficiaries who acknowledge and are actively grateful for the great debt owed to the military men and women of our country.

So let’s not forget that in our big hurry to bring our men and women home, we would do well to examine our reasons. Not only the arguments I hear in the news ad nauseum about becoming “occupiers” and wanting to “control the world’s oil” and giving our soldiers free opportunities to “terrorize women” in Iraq (thank you for bringing this to our attention, Senator Kerry! We’ll be right on that) and so on and so on.

In this national conversation, let’s not forget to dig down deep and find out if part of our squeamishness about having our troops in harm’s way has a lot more to do with our fears of having to change ourselves and our own attitudes than it has to do with our fear of possible injury and death for our troops. We owe them at least that much, not to mention our lives besides.