Don't You Know There's a War On?!?

…And we have so many wars to choose from: the war on terror, the war on cancer, the war against marriage, against women, against poverty. We have race wars and culture wars and class wars, on drugs, on kids, and on insulin, of all things. If you want to fight for something bigger than yourself there are no lack for noble causes.

I worked in a real war once, or maybe it was just a conflict or police action? Congress kept changing its mind about that. Whatever it was I won’t say fought in it because I never pulled a trigger, but I did get up every morning (except the ones where I had worked through the night), pick up my wrenches and fix broken vehicles. I felt good about it, too. I never had to question my value to my country or my world, I was contributing to the nebulous Good and I felt good about it. I was helping to protect the white hats while they went out to capture the black hats, and even though the war could have been fought just as well without me, it would have been completely stagnant without people like me and that justified my existence for the day.

Now it’s different. I dropped my wrenches and picked up a word processor, and this question nags me; what have I done to contribute the nebulous Good today? I have become the American dream that I once swore to protect which is kind of noble I suppose, but I feel like I should be doing more. I should join another war, but which one?

Wars, it turns out, are more complicated than they seem. Take the right to life vs. the right to choose, for example. A pregnant girl should be able to unpregnify herself, right? Unless that squiggly thing inside her counts as human person, of course, then that would be state sanctioned murder. On the other hand, it seems that crime has taken a dramatic dip since Roe v. Wade. As it turns out, the kind of girl that has impulsive unprotected sex resulting in an unplanned child is not the kind that makes a great mother, so giving her the option to preemptively “take care” of her little bundle of joy means that those children never grow up to do crime. Back to the original hand, are we willing to go ahead and kill people before they are born for the crimes that they may or may not commit in the future? So we are back on the pro life side again, but then you see that if an impoverished woman has a baby, she not only has to pay out the nose for food, clothing and care for the bugger, she also isn’t able to work or finish school or whatever. Her opportunities are limited, and she stays poor. And then there is the bit that African Americans terminate their pregnancies more per capita than whites, and you have racial complications added to class complications.

This confusion is not unique to the right to life debate. The same can be said for the war on marriage, or the war on drugs, or the war on women, of which the war on babies is apparently a part. They are all miserable balls of guilt and vitriol, and I’m not interested in jumping in the middle of it.

Maybe I should ply my pen in a more neutral cause. Danielle Steele won’t be winning any humanitarian awards, but at least she is a stalwart heroine in the War on Boredom and that counts for something.