This past weekend marked the official start of the holiday shopping season. After stuffing themselves with turkey, dressing, and mashed potatoes on Thanksgiving, millions of Americans got up earlier than they would on a work day to hit the department stores the day after Thanksgiving.
This always leads to CNN, MSNBC, and local affiliates running stories on the chaos in the malls. As usual, I saw stories about people getting trampled at Wal-Mart, violence at the mall due to "holiday rage". I even saw a twelve minute piece on CNN devoted to "holiday rage". What is it? What are people doing to curb it. What meds should we take to reduce the rage in all of us during the holiday season. Two days after Thanksgiving, I was heading to a local coffee shop to get my morning fix and there was a line of people outside of PetCo waiting for the store to open. Is there some kind of hot dog toy on the market this year that all of the dogs want? What could you possibly need to wait outside of PetCo, in the cold, for?
Of course the news this weekend wasn't all about "holiday rage" and shoppers gone mad. There's also this war we're fighting in Iraq. And over the four-day weekend, the violence escalated and became more gruesome. Six Sunnis were burned alive in a retaliatory attack. On Thursday a series of car bombs killed nearly 200 Shiites.
While Iraq burns, Americans are busy fighting over what to buy little Timmy for Christmas. This demonstrates how disconnected and indifferent Americans feel about this war. The war in Iraq does affect hundreds of thousands of families in the U.S., but that's a small percentage. Most Americans don't see the war affecting their lives directly. It's just another war in another place between us and people we don't understand. That's frightening.
Juxtapose the mad dash to buy things with the madness in Iraq and you get a sense for how detached we are. In the midst of a war that is spiralling out of control and that has now lasted longer than our involvement in World War II, we are trampling each other all in the name of consumerism.
I'm not advocating that everyone should stop buying Christmas gifts, nor am I saying that we need to spend our shopping time protesting the war. But I think that our attitude towards the war is reflected in this frenzied holiday tradition. Most Americans have had enough of the war. They voiced their opinion about it three weeks ago by hoisting the Democrats to power. Public indifference is any administration's worst nightmare when fighting a war. During World War I, President Wilson created the Creel Commission to help generate a positive public attitude toward U.S. involvement. Similar techniques were used by the Roosevelt Administration.
Times have changed though and they started to change during Vietnam. The public never bought into that war and eventually lack of interest contributed to the government leaving our troops in the middle of a civil war for years. If we don't get out of Iraq soon, we might find ourselves in a similar situation by the next presidential election.
The Daily Spectator