The concluding paragraph from a post written yesterday by Jon Taplin:
We live in an age of forgetting. The monstrous information flow that washes over us on a hourly basis, pushes out recent events and their lessons and fills our minds with new obsessions: Spitzer, Ferraro, Spears, Market Meltdown. The fact that men and women are dying and being maimed in their loyal service to a fatally flawed policy is soon pushed off our TV screens and the front pages of our newspapers. Communications scholars have long understood the power of governments to persuade by obfuscation and fear. If the coming election is to serve the purpose of renewing our commitment to Lincoln’s government “of the people, by the people and for the people”, then we must not forget our brothers and sisters dying on the plains of Iraq. We are in the role of British Redcoats and Hessians on the commons of Concord, Massachusetts 232 years ago. We must take our soldiers out Iraq and let the Iraqi people decide their own fate.
I certainly agree with the first sentence. I also agree with the last. It's the penultimate one that will bug me all day -- because though I understand the thought, I think the analogy is misleading. Yes, we've cast ourselves in the role of occupying army, but to think of Iraqis as the militia at Lexington and Concord on that fateful day misses some important points.
The British colonists who survived the running skirmishes of April 19, 1775, later helped form a wildly diverse young nation via often painful compromise with fellow countrymen of different beliefs, backgrounds and interests. I think it would be a mistake to presume that the people attacking our soldiers in Iraq have anything in common with the Minutemen of 1775 beyond mere gun ownership.
Our debt to them isn't merely rhetorical. I think modern citizenship now requires that we struggle daily against our own forgetting. It's the beginning step in all that we must do.
(And no, there were no Hessians at Lexington or Concord. But let's not quibble.)
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