The American Killing Machine And Us

I have a very clear memory of sitting in the passenger seat of my dad’s car as a teenager and listening to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on the radio. It was 2003, we were almost certainly listening to NPR, and Rumsfeld was talking about the United States’ ability to simultaneously wage war on Iraq and North Korea if necessary. We were about five minutes from home, but I remember feeling distinctly unsafe. I wasn’t afraid of any immediate bodily harm; it was a purely existential panic. A kind of thousand-yard stare steeped in dread that only a first fateful meeting of senseless violence and a newly adult brain can produce.

My dad and I talked about it as we drove, and he reassured me that things were going to be okay. But part of why I remember this so well is because he wrote an article about it in the local newspaper. In the story, he admits to steering the conversation toward optimism, potentially at the expense of truth. He admits to having his own crisis in adolescence about the threat of war, the unsettling experience of visiting his uncle’s bomb shelter, and about wishing his kids were free from the hell of such anxieties.