Our response to Iraq

How closely are you following events on the ground in Iraq? Has the war influenced your actions in any way? If you are like me or those with whom I have discussed Iraq, your answers would be that you do not have time to follow the war and that the war has little bearing on your life, respectively. Members of our generation are largely content to go on with their lives without contemplating the notion that people our age are fighting a brutal war overseas.

On Monday, Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of The New Republic magazine, said in a lecture at the Wilson School that the disillusionment experienced by today's youth as a result of the Iraq war is the successor to both the disillusionment of the Vietnam War-era and World War I-era youth. He was correct in asserting that youth in all three generations lost faith in government and in the power of democracy. But it is the response to that disillusionment, not the feeling itself, which ultimately defined WWI's lost generation and the Vietnam War generation. And it is our response to the Iraq war, or lack thereof, which will ultimately define our generation.

The turmoil of WWI, unimaginable to anyone before the war, prompted despair in members of the lost generation. They responded with Dada art and modern literature that reflected their loss of faith in the human being. The Vietnam War generation responded to their discouragement by breaking established societal norms and organizing massive protests calling for change.

Our generation has done comparatively nothing as of yet. While we may have vague opinions on the war, more often than not that America should leave Iraq, there has been no mass movement in any direction. Very few of us show real concern for what is happening on the ground in the Middle East. The bottom line is that those of us who have no personal ties to the Iraq war are largely uninterested in what is happening.

My roommate and I sometimes laugh about the vacuous headlines on AOL's website. As I write this, their news headline is "Did Taco Bell Sicken Diners?" Surely, today's intellectual elite would not waste their time reading such "news." But recently, we realized that we are no more likely to read another story about a suicide bombing in Iraq than to read about bacteria in our burritos.

There is little doubt that our generation distrusts the American government. A recent Gallup poll reveals that only 30 percent of Americans are happy with the way things are going in our country. Given the liberal tendencies of youth and the conservative tendencies of our leadership, that percentage among our generation might be even lower.

Unlike the Vietnam War generation, we are not voicing our complaints about the government. Perhaps the explanation for this discrepancy is that events in Iraq have had no effect on our everyday lives. There is no draft to force us into service. Very few people today go to war out of a sense of duty. As discussed in "AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America's Upper Classes from Military Service" by Kathy Roth-Douquet and Frank Schaeffer, America's upper classes are highly underrepresented in the armed services.

Furthermore, disillusionment with the political system is distinct from disillusionment with the economic system. The stock market is up and, more importantly for our generation, the job market is sweet. After graduation, we'll find a satisfactory job or take our pick of graduate schools, where we can continue to ignore Iraq.

The unfairness of this situation goes without saying. Members of the armed forces are risking their lives, and the rest of us live as if there were not a war going on. Thankfully, the Iraq Study Group recommended Wednesday that most troops be withdrawn by 2008 — a welcome change after an election season full of "stay the course" rhetoric.

I hope that the notoriously stubborn Bush administration heeds this advice. But as the withdrawal progresses, there is little reason to believe that our generation will pay any more attention to the situation than we have for the past couple years. Unless, of course, some unlikely sense of patriotism or sleight of circumstance lands us in the Middle East. The rising stock market and inviting job market would be as distant as the war is to those of us preparing complacently to enter the world of individual success. Michael Medeiros is a freshman from Bethesda, Md. He may be reached at mmedeiro@princeton.edu.