The current national depression that we are facing is a tremendously unsettling and anxiety-causing event. With millions of us losing our jobs and the markets taking more serious tumbles every week, it seems like things could not really get much worse.
It is even causing many people to begin to question the whole “democratic experiment” that we as Americans are testing every day of our freedom-loving lives.
All societies eventually fall right? The Greeks, the Romans … is the U.S. really all that different?
I propose a solution that is bleak and not entirely welcome, but I feel all of us are aware of and know to be true, though we may be afraid to mention it or even bring it up as a solution: We need a global event that is so encompassing and attention grabbing that it truly rattles the foundations of human existence as we know it.
That’s right, my faithful State Press readers, I am calling for war.
What brought us together as a people in the first place when we rallied together to demand our independence from the British? War. What allowed us to abolish slavery and rejoin together stronger than ever as a nation when it seemed to all that we should break apart along the Mason-Dixon Line and become separate countries? War. What brought us out of perhaps the only economic depression that has been greater than the present crisis and rallied our citizens to come together and fight a two-front conflict and “keep the world safe for Democracy?” War.
War is the only feasible answer to solve all of our problems — bank executives buying private jets when receiving taxpayer bailouts, the “big three” in Detroit laying off millions in order to make their year ending quotas. Those are small potatoes when you have to consider that we are a nation at war. Overpopulation and millions starving across the globe, dictatorial governments and anti-American regimes controlling the fates of millions of their citizens, and what solves all these problems other than war?
I’m not calling for more wars like we are currently fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor am I somehow reducing the important steps being made towards freedom and democracy that I’m sure are being accomplished there. Instead, I am calling for a war of global proportions that can truly capture the hearts and minds of us as Americans in a way that was similar to the Civil War or World War II.
Those two wars brought us together as a people in a way that no economic tax break or small time operation could ever have. We were dealing with racism, sexism, poverty and immigration — all the same major problems that we still face today — but all of those problems simply fell by the wayside in comparison to the conflicts that were being waged at the time.
Americans in large part set aside their differences and biases and came together to donate food and clothes, sew flags and write patriotic songs, work in the textile mills and factories so that our American enterprise could continue on. These are things that we desperately need in our current America. We should learn from these events of the past and use them to fix our current situation.
While you may not agree with me and think me insane and heartless for even suggesting such a thing, what cannot be denied are the facts behind my argument. Ask your parents and grandparents, read a history book or simply look at old photographs of Rosie the Riveter and the like, then ask yourself if this is the America that you would rather live in.
War is one possible solution, granted not the perfect one, but one that would work and benefit us as both a nation and a people.
Alex wants to hear your alternatives to war. Tell them to him at alex.bolt@asu.edu.
