Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Country

Are we at war?  Were we at war?  It's hard to tell.

News flows moment to moment, endlessly panicked, breathless, and reactive.  But if you step outside, and turn off your phone, there's not even the whiff of war.  America remains oblivious and untouched, except for a modest bump upwards in the price of gas.  There aren't shortages.  Sirens and alerts don't sound, and distant columns of smoke don't rise lazily upwards in the bright spring sky.

Nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us.  Not a thing.  

When republics go to war, citizens are generally expected to pitch in.  Grow a garden. Reduce your consumption, so the troops don't have to go without.  Be alert, at least.  But none of that is true.

Out in my garden, amongst my other garden flair...sleeping gnomes, umbrella-wielding Totoros, windmills, and the like...there's a sign from another time.  It's a bit of tin, upon which is printed a call to Garden for Victory, as so many Americans once did.  I do that, all the time, because it is, as the sign says, "thrifty and patriotic."   It's hard to be a patriot these days, because patriotism in a republic requires more than blind obedience.  Still, doing the right thing is doing the right thing.  

We are, for now, in the midst of our second war in less than five months.  We are overthrowing a monstrous regime,  but we're also not, and we're going to obliterate them, while letting them sell oil at huge profits to support their war effort, and we're killing and existentially threatening their leadership, while at the same time expecting them to negotiate.  

Given the gibbering incoherence of our addled leadership, a sentient citizen must come to their own conclusions.  Iran is, obviously, a war over oil, because the common-sense through-line between Venezuela and Iran is control over fossil fuel resources. 

And so, as I would if we were still a decent and honorable republic, I'm using less fuel, because that seems like the thing a citizen would do if they were patriotic.  It's what my grandparents did.

Yesterday, in the heat of a false summer, I did all of my necessary travelling on my scooter.  To church, and back, and then to celebrate a little one's birthday with some old friends.   The roads were full of traffic, heavy with Americans rushing about, as we always are, fat with SUVs and pickup trucks.  It was just an ordinary Sunday.

Because nothing, nothing at all, is asked of us, other than to keep spending money, not asking questions, and carrying on as if nothing is happening.