As a quality of intellect and experience, wisdom is perhaps the most valuable asset any society can rely upon when its problems defy conventional solutions. For thousands of years, kings, pharaohs and emperors sought the advice of elders and philosophers, yet they rarely received direct answers to their questions. What they did get, however, was perspective and universal truth. Sometimes, that was not enough. Many men of great wisdom were beheaded for failing to tell the king what he wanted to hear.
Today, wisdom carries about as much weight as a fortune cookie. In America, we now have young and ambitious presidential advisors who know a great deal about political strategy, public opinion and speechwriting, but lack historical perspective and conscience. They can pitch a full nine innings of political storyboard without blinking. Unfortunately, concepts like universal truth and human compassion are foreign to them. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that we continue to fight a war that has already been lost; that our monetary system is no longer based on sound economic principles; that our infrastructure is decaying exponentially in proportion to the gross negligence of those responsible, and perhaps most tragically, there is no longer any real evidence to support our position as a nation committed to the preservation of human welfare and dignity.
We truly were the greatest nation in the world at one time, and our status as such depended on more than military might and wealth. We can boast to the world that we still retain that status, but there are too many signposts telling us we are going in the wrong direction. Some stand out. Great nations do not deceive their people, and they do not downplay the damage done to those who have fought their wars. Nor do they nickel-and-dime their needs. In America, the needs are substantial. The deception is as old as war itself.
“Violence is invariably intertwined with the lie.” I do not think Alexander Solzhenitsyn was flying a kite when he said that in 1918, and the quote is as applicable today as it was then. We know too much already about the lies. More than 4,000 soldiers have been killed in Iraq for a purpose that remains a mystery. There are thousands more whose lives have been insidiously ruined by psychological trauma in a war unlike any other; a war being waged against an enemy that embraces the one thing we fear the most – death.
“Suicide bombers are everywhere,” a returnee told me, “and when they blow, there’s not a thing you can do. How do you strike back at an enemy that is no longer there? It takes the soldier out of you.”
For many, it takes more than that from them. They return psychologically damaged and unable to function. Their dreams and hopes for the future are gone – erased by the constant, unbearable stress they have endured and unspeakable horrors they have seen. For many of these young men, the damage is irreversible.
“It could get worse,” the returnee said. “One day, three of us were walking down a quiet street when a baby’s head landed at my feet. I looked up and saw a bearded man leaning out of a third floor window, smiling.”
Can you imagine what that does to someone’s psyche?
These soldiers, most of them kids, had dreams – you know, the white picket fence, the two beautiful daughters and maybe a boy they would take to ball games, and of course, the lovely young woman they would marry and love … forever. Many of them carried photographs in their wallets. Between firefights, they shared those photos with the only friend they had, only to see him blown to bits the next day by an RPG.
The collective wisdom of the Bush administration is apparent in its response to the psychological damage done to these young men who have fought for the lies they have been told. The administration is not ignoring the problem – it is minimizing it. The coordinator of a VA facility in Texas was the first to act on the new policy, pressuring mental health clinicians to avoid diagnosing PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). She was up front with it, too, making them aware that this diagnosis qualifies veterans for lifetime psychiatric care. Oh yes, we are a great country, with the economic resources to finance wars and build space stations, but we will not care for our own people.
The “lie” extends far beyond the reasons for the war. It encompasses the administration’s purported “humanitarian” principles; the ideals we were told we were fighting for in the first place. “Enormous” is the only word I can come up with to describe the contradiction.
I am sure the administration will put a spin on this. Someone will say, “Well sure, there were 12,000 suicide attempts by our veterans last year, but that’s not so bad when you compare it to the total number of attempts for the entire population.”
With or without the spin, it is evident that this administration callously perpetuated a war that has incinerated the future for thousands of good young men, stealing their aspirations, hopes and dreams. For some, the photographs they carry now are unrecognizable. For others, the colorful images of a life awaiting them are gone. All that is left are gray and distant memories.
The anger I harbored for the “lie” has been replaced with a sense of overwhelming sadness. Any one of those men could have been my son, or yours. Is there anything we wouldn’t do for those beautiful children we created and loved more than life itself?