This letter-writer to the NY Times gets it right:
"Joshua Foer has omitted the most critical reason his privileged classmates at Yale have had such overwhelming support for the war in Iraq: there is no military draft.
"This conflict is being fought by working-class and poor kids who joined the military as a viable economic option. The undergraduates at Yale would be shutting down the campus if we had a universal draft with no college deferments."
The point can be generalized beyond navel-gazing Yale undergraduates. I'd find the various bloggers who pontificate about war less nauseatingly pathetic if they would take a leave of absence from their cushy academic posts, and put their lives where their purported "principles" are--or at least if they shipped their oldest child off to war pronto. But the fact is that these dreary pundits are frauds, eager to send others to die, and willing to risk nothing--nothing!--themselves. (That many are childless is surely not irrelevant to their bloodthirsty posture.)
If you really think the war in Iraq was a moral cause, Professor X, then request a leave of absence tomorrow, and get to work. Risk something. Until then, realize that all the world knows a hypocrite when it sees one.
Recent Comments