The Powerful Eat Their Young



In each generation of traceable history, the young have served and died

for the powerful. It would serve us ill to assume otherwise

now. Threat to our homeland and tacit approval polls (which

never quite get the question right), have flashed such a green

light in front of all the president's men that they can't rev

up and race around the world fast enough crying Foe! Foe!

Foe begone! After all, what ever would have become of our

budding country if we hadn't nipped the imminent threat of Native

American culture?



Could such a farce of ethical relativism change in this

lifetime? It may be hard to imagine in these crazy days of

the suicide bomber and enslaved child warrior in Africa, but

the notion that much fighting is carried out by

unconventional, pubescent "soldiers," seems to indicate that

not too many strong older men are willing to risk their lives

for the folly of the few who stand to gain by bloodshed.


Is it a surprise, really, that those wars waged in the

twentieth century and the inaugural war (if Bush had said

"last war", he'd have made it into my personal Bartlett's) of the

twenty-first century, are dowsed with fuel and relentlessly

fanned by the old, (and older still), guard of the power elite?

Yet many people, seemingly most of those under 25 years of age, fight and die in manufactured wars where

a pot of gold awaits political leprechauns, those tricky bearded charmers,

while leaving the ideologically duped to be buried once again

beneath a fading rainbow of fractured cause. The cost of wrongful war can bleed

a country's heart for decades.



-30-

Nanci Van Schmus @2003