by Richard Stern

I've just heard President Bush's not ineloquent description of the war that the rational, peace-loving people of the world are waging against the evil murderers who hate liberty, democracy, and peace. He speaks of this as a war very different from but comparable in importance to the war against fascism which concluded the year before he was born. I was alive and aware during that war, and as far as quality of national life goes, it did not resemble the life we are leading now. Like almost every boy in my class, I did such things as collected and rolled tin foil into supposedly usable balls and when in the country, had a small "victory garden" where I raised a few radishes. My mother rolled bandages down at the Red Cross. My uncles were either in war-related businesses (the silk business which was involved in parachute making) or volunteering their time at the Office of Price Administration. Uniforms were everywhere, the trains were packed with soldiers, the stations tense with heartrending farewells. Everyone you knew was somehow connected with the war: Your cousins were fighting in North Africa, Sicily, the Pacific; your friends' older brothers and parents were far away and mailing the thin blue email letters back home. Almost everyone followed the day's battleground events, charted the progress or retreats on the map, knew the casualty figures, cheered and booed the political leaders in the newsreels. Total war. Today, the war is something on the television news, the occasional press conferences, the newspapers. Few are in uniform. I know no one fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan and whenever I hear of someone's nephew or cousin fighting, I'm a bit more engaged than I otherwise would be. In World War II, President Roosevelt's sons were in the army. Indeed, 18 year old G. H.W. Bush volunteered as a pilot and postponed his life at Yale. Is there anyone in his son's large family serving in the military? Have none of them been persuaded by his eloquence and force to volunteer to fight in the great cause he espouses? And the rest of us? Oh yes, we were aroused on that amazing day in September when the two great towers disintegrated before our eyes and for a few days afterward we digested a new turn in the life of the nation and perhaps, to a small degree, in our own lives. But now? Weariness, disgust, anger, boredom.