War is Heck.

This worries me.

Not just because of the fact that Iraq veterans are being fucked over by the bucketful, which is troubling enough as it is. Not just because of the economic burden that today's students are going to have to bear once we sober up and start having to pay into our parents' social security.

What I'm worried about is that being so detached from Iraq now is going to make war more palatable to the already war prone country that we are. And let's face facts, folks- we are war prone. Even if you think most of the wars we've fought have been good ones, you still have to admit we've fought a hell of a lot of them in our scant two-and-a-half-odd centuries as a nation. A generation from now, our children are going to look at the crippled economy we threw up into their waiting hands and they're not going to know what to do with it. Hopefully, they'll deal with it by amping up funding for science in schools and universities and use it to start developing and exporting consumer goods.

Or they might look at America's unbelievable military might and ask themselves, "how can we turn this into grocery money?" And since they've been raised by a generation that won't be able to teach them what it's like to be personally impacted by war, it's entirely possible that they'll answer that question the same way the Mongols did. When that happens, I sincerely hope they blame the state of the economy on their parents and not on foreigners.