A Question For Baby Boomers

++A blogger at Daily Kos raised this question of us.Do you see your generation's legacy as that of permanent war? 

++That question has been bugging me ever since President Obama declared war on ISIS. The United States has been in a perpetual state of war since 1989. 25, now 26 years straight where the defense budget exceeds the percentage of the budget at the height of the Reagan years, even factoring in inflation.

++My son has never lived when this country wasn't in a hot war. 

++Incredibly only in Jimmy Carter's short tenure did we have one administration that didn't wage any war. Even Ronald Reagan was miserly with a short invasion of Grenada. Since then we have embraced war as the first option, even before "real diplomacy". We still go through the motions of putting ultimatums on the table but we don't even take those seriously.

++As James Fallows pointed out in the Atlantic, we have made it so easy to go to war. No one in Congress wants to invoke the War Powers Act, no one  really wants to cut the defense budget for fear of appearing weak. No one actually has to fight, since it is an all volunteer army. And because of the special interests profiting from wars, our military doesn't have to know how to win anymore.

++That's why the Ryan Budget has so many fans in Washington, defense spending only increases, discretionary funding decreases, and taxes are cut. We can have endless wars far into the horizon.

++Baby Boomers like to point out the days of the anti-Vietnam period and how "we" stopped the war. We didn't. The elites figured not was lost and planned the exit. We were their excuse.

++The anti-Iraq war protestors brought out greater numbers than the anti-Vietnam protestors and it went global. Did it stop anything? Saddam Hussein even offered to leave if he could keep a billion dollars. This was ignored because we wanted a war. There was no real accountability.

++Listening to the Noam Chomsky interview conducted by Chris Hedges brought this question of our generation's legacy to the fore. Chomsky was eerie when he talked about the strong pacifist traditions in the United States before WWI. This was not an isolationism but rather frankly an aversion to foreign wars. I can't imagine such a time. 

++Do we want such a time? The Cold War had enormous collateral damage in American policies throughout the Third World. But today's collateral damage not only exists throughout the world but comes home with rampant suicide rates among vets and PTSD that is at plague levels. 

++Do we want to stop this or do we want to continue to ignore this? I don't know but the bloggers question still is disturbing.