We Must Oppose Peaceniks
There is a certain segment of the population on any contemporary college campus that is never satisfied unless it is dissatisfied. So addicted is this small minority to the rush one receives from righteous indignation that, after centuries of moral progress in what is by now a relatively just society, their lives are reduced to a desperate search for sufficiently eye-catching evils to combat. Sweatshops one year, the low wages of University workers the next - while collegiate activism addicts often find themselves fighting real and continuing injustices, their brief battles are mere momentary fads, reduced to being the political equivalent of bellbottoms or boy bands.
In the middle of the 2001 fall fashion season, however - a season which was supposed to bring with it both shorter hemlines and renewed opposition to the IMF - Americans witnessed evil in its purest and most dramatic form. Here, finally, was a genuine need for immediate action. Habitual activists thus joined their fellow students in giving blood and helping to organize aid for the victims of the tragedy, and I applaud them for their good work.
Horrified at for once being part of a moral majority, however, this coterie soon found that the relief effort was insufficient to satisfy its old addiction. A real jolt of righteous indignation, it seems, comes only from a stance directly opposed to that of the American mainstream, or, as they like to call it, the capitalist hegemony. The movementarians needed to find a new, less popular movement for themselves, and sure enough one was to be found with relative ease - a late '60s classic that never goes out of style, one by the name of "peace."
Generally speaking, I too am in favor of peace. (For the record, I'm generally well to the left of Joe Lieberman.) Not only would I take a state of peace over a state of war any day, I am also opposed to such military tactics as the invasion of randomly selected developing nations or the wholesale slaughter of their innocent civilians. Except for those with a religiously grounded commitment to absolute pacifism, however, we can all agree that there are times when certain acts of war are both appropriate and just. The vast majority of the American people believe that now is one of those times, and they are right to do so.