It seems to me the human collective psyche has adjusted to having shooting wars in various parts of the globe as an ongoing feature among modern nations. They are no longer the pressing, all-out national emergencies of WWI and WWII. Those wars taught us that if you want freedom to survive you had better pick up a gun or go to work to get enough supplies out to the soldiers. This shift in consciousness is a result of several things. Tv news first brought daily images of carnage in Vietnam never seen in the American home, right into the living room. By the mid 70's people were tired of it, bored by it as long as it stays over there, and were tuning it out to watch Hollywood. You can't blame them really. What could they do about it? No one cared about war so much any more and it became a distant reality. It just didn't hit home like when your brother died overseas or when your youth was spent working in a bomb factory.

Another thing was how the change to an all-volunteer army underscored the function of choice in deciding whether or not you wanted to fight and pay attention to war as a daily reality in your life. You could now decide to distance yourself from world events if you wanted to, with no need to really pay attention. You no longer had to fight for anything, we had a volunteer Army to do that. Your freedom was handed to you. To go to war must have meant you liked war... or so the defective reasoning went. The collective psyche took a step back in this country from the reality of war and how it can affect our lives.

I never performed military service, never stood on the front line for America in an armed conflict with another country. And most Americans these days have not. My father stood on the front lines in South Korea in the early 50's, he dodged bullets for several years there. He has a greater sense of the value of life and the meaning of national service than I did as a young man. In my youth we had the invasion of Iraq, the one where Saddam Hussein had a very nasty army built up out of oil revenues. For a while in 1989-90 there was talk of reinstating the draft to supply soldiers to defeat him. A renewed draft would have hit me for sure if it happened. I became more conscious of that the freedoms we enjoy as Americans are first class, and that many have died for our nation in this pursuit.