The One Percent War *

By Madeleine Kando

We’ve finally done it. Our troops are coming home. Does that mean we have declared peace? You would call it ‘peace’ if this had been a ‘traditional’ war. A war where two opposing armies fight each other. When you declare peace, you usually stop fighting and the warriors lay down their arms, go home and pick up their interrupted lives. There is a peace treaty. The vanquished have to pay, the conquerors reap the bounty.

Unfortunately, this time there is no one to sign a peace treaty with. The enemy is remote. The enemy explodes bombs in a far away place. It kills randomly to ‘prove a point’. Even though it is a lethal enemy, to most Americans it is abstract, an enemy you read about in the papers and hear about on the news. Some people even go as far as to say that the enemy was invented by the conquering army.

When I was very very young, there was a war going on in Europe. It was a big war. I knew there was a war because there was no food, there were bombs, there were dead horses floating down the rivers. My mother had to steal or barter silverware for potatoes. My father had to sneak out and dismantle railway tracks for firewood. My siblings and I had to wear false ID’s so we wouldn’t get deported to Auschwitz.

But this war is invisible to me. I don’t see dead horses in the streets of Boston, I don’t hear detonations in the distance. I don’t see empty shelves in the supermarket.

You see, I don’t belong to the one percent that fought this war in one form or another. Nobody even asked me to contribute financially to the war effort. Even though I never understood why we are at war in Iraq, I am baffled and silently ashamed. I am part of the 99% that has not participated in this war (and I am not talking about the 99% that occupies Wall Street). I didn’t lose a loved one in the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers, I don’t have a son or a daughter fighting in Iraq. I am one of the 99% that goes about their daily lives pretending that there is no war going on.

The one percent that fought this war are the ones that saw dead horses, dead children, dead fathers and mothers, dead platoon buddies and now they are coming home. Are we going to have parades? Are we going to wave little American flags as the troops rumble down the avenues of our cities? Are we going to throw flowers and climb on their tanks to hug them with tears in our eyes?

The McNeill Lehrer report has been faithful all these years by ending their program with a few minutes of silence as they air photos of fallen soldiers. So, yes, once a day, I am reminded that we are at war. But the word ‘we’ sounds false, because it doesn’t include me. I didn’t contribute to the war and I don’t contribute to the peace. I am just one of the 99%. leave comment here
* Thomas Friedman's words in 'That Used to Be Us'