This past Wednesday, November 11, marked Veterans Day in the US. It is a day on which wreathes are laid, and soldiers mourned, and the memories of fallen Americans, lost to war, are honored. It is a day to reflect on the meaning of sacrifice, and perhaps, at its best, a day to consider the price to be paid, thereby tempering our patriotic zeal with grim comprehension, when we as a nation consider sending our citizens to war.
Over the past twenty-five years, Veterans Day has indeed brought up difficult questions, as many, perhaps a majority of Americans ponder the reality of more than 58,000 killed in Vietnam with the understanding that they should never have been sent. We were America, we were strong, and we were confident in the moral authority of our leadership. And so they went. And fought. And died.
And today, with the hard-to-swallow but dangerous-to-ignore lessons of history floating in our collective memory, Vietnam stands as a stark symbol of the horror and the waste and cultural divisiveness inherent in making the wrong decision. And all that we can do is promise ourselves, and promise our dead, that we will not make the same mistake again.
But this week, even as veterans and families and friends paid tribute, another war was being fought. It is a lower-intensity conflict than they saw in Vietnam, but it is no less a war. Fought with guns and surveillance, backed up with prison camps and the curtailing of liberties, the Drug War has its own vets, its own dead, and its own legacy. It is primarily a domestic war, but our soldiers also serve and fight in Colombia, Bolivia, Panama, and countless other outposts. And they are armed. And they kill. And they are killed.
Police, federal agents, members of the military, civilians, all are represented among the casualties. They are no less dead than those who fell in Vietnam. And, to the dishonor of the memory of those who fell in Nam, the war they died in is no less pointless.
Decades into the Drug War, after all of the billions spent, and the lives wasted, and the millions jailed, we are no closer to a "drug free America" than South Vietnam was to free-market capitalism when the last Marines, clinging to the landing gear, took off from the roof of the American embassy. Our kids, the generation in whose name we fight, have better access to drugs today than did the high school students who marched to end the last war, before they too could be sent to shed pointless blood, at a time when the current war was just getting underway in earnest.
This week America remembered its fallen, and, in the case of the veterans of our last foreign war, dishonored them as well. Once again, we have engaged in a conflict with no foreseeable endpoint. Once again, we have misjudged the nature of both the terrain and the enemy. Once again we are saddled with a national leadership who have staked reputations and careers on a struggle they cannot win. And once again we continue to put American lives at risk long after the futility of our strategy has become apparent.
There are always lessons in history, perhaps none so important as those that come from our gravest mistakes. 58,000 men and women in uniform lost their lives in service to a lesson that we ignored this week, even as we laid flowers on their graves. Perhaps next year we will remember. Perhaps one day we will never forget. But for today, the fighting continues. There is no greater tragedy than a pointless war.
Adam J.
Smith
Associate Director
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| Issue #67, 11/13/98 84% of Mandatory Minimum Drug Sentences in Massachusetts Served by 1st-Time Offenders | Protesters in District of Columbia Call for Release of I-59 Results | Students Fight Back against Higher Education Act Drug Provision | Medical Marijuana Signature Gatherers Harassed by Sheriff in Florida | Oregon Police Illegally Tapped Agricultural Supply Store's Phones -- Perhaps for Years | British House of Lords Committee Calls for Medical Marijuana Access | New German Government to Consider Legalizing Cannabis | Quote of the Week | Editorial: Remembering Veterans, Ignoring Lessons |
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StoptheDrugWar.org: the Drug Reform Coordination Network (DRCNet)
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