I saw in our local newspaper this week that a bridge will be named for one of the guys from this area who was killed in Iraq. Understandable gesture, to be sure, and I hope it brings some measure of solace to his 
family. If it does, they should dedicate a bridge to every one of the more than 4,300 sacrificed needlessly in that seemingly endless war. I doubt we have enough bridges to name for all the Iraqis who’ve died as a result of the 2003 invasion. (I don’t know – are there a million bridges in America?) Whenever I hear about these dedications, monuments, memorials to war dead, I can’t help but think of that eulogy Marc Antony delivered in Julius Caesar: “I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him.” We always hear about how they died “protecting our freedoms,” when really they died because of our ignorance as a nation and our inability to stop this travesty from happening.
This has nothing to do with how soldiers and their families feel about the war and how it has affected them. They are the only ones at war in this country right now – the rest of us are living in peacetime. And when our political leaders climb over one another to ascribing a noble cause to the crime that is the Iraq war, they are merely praising themselves at the expense of the fallen. The war that they started, on our behalf, is still ruining lives day after day, month after month, year after bloody year. Seems like I’ve been seeing that succession of faces at the end of the PBS News Hour each week for as long as I’ve been alive, each one making me feel more ashamed of my failure to have prevented this grievous loss. We should all feel that shame, every one of us who is not in jeopardy of being deployed, who merely sees this war as a tiresome cable show that has gone on a bit too long. And like Antony, we should use our outrage to seek justice and accountability – but most importantly, an end to the killing.
Will this happen in America? I’m growing more than a bit pessimistic. The vast, vast majority of us are too separated from the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan. At most, we wag a sign in the air outside our 
congressman’s office, or we shake our head at the news, but without the prospect of conscription threatening ourselves and/or our children, there will be no fire in the belly. That is something our political class and our military have long since worked out. They’ve long since adopted the imperial formula for endless war – a foreign legion made up of volunteers, supplemented by mercenaries. And they name bridges after those sacrificed on the alter of our stupidity. So perhaps we need a different kind of monument, one dedicated to those persistent killers that live within us: ignorance and apathy. That’s it – dedicate a bridge to our own foolishness. Or chisel Dubya’s face into Rushmore so that we’ll remember who talked us into this travesty. Anything to memorialize the historic, disastrous mistake we’ve made, so that there’s some small chance we won’t repeat it.
Then again, there’s still the war to remind us.
luv u,
jp
