This country was built on war, and that foundation shows no signs of wavering.
By Caitlin Schneider, Discourse Blog
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.

It’s now 21 years later and nothing on that front has changed. America is still the highly productive war machine it’s always been. My story of realizing that fact certainly isn’t novel, but it’s mine, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot this week, and about the immense emotional weight I felt back then. I thought about it when Israel dropped bombs on Lebanon last week, and when Iran sent missiles into Israel. It’s like my brain was reverting back to that car seat in 2003, wondering whether there was a chance something bigger—something more personal—was coming for me.
Based on conversations I’ve had this week, I don’t think I’m alone. Even after a year of horrific violence and mass death in Gaza—a year of mourning, anger, and an undeniable shift in the way much of the world sees the struggle for Palestinian liberation—it still feels like panic and dread hit new levels this week. As Jack put it so perfectly to me yesterday, “We seem to have gone past despair and into delirium.”
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