On yellow ribbons and the two Americas

(Note: This is not a political post. It is about the personal experiences, and those of family and friends, that shape perceptions regarding war.)

The people who put "I support the troops" yellow ribbons on their cars can be easy targets for jokes, because for many of them it seems too knee-jerk, arguably tacky, and even possibly hypcritical. Some drive ridiculous SUVs that tell the world, "I also support the ruling elites of oil-producing war-torn countries."

A quick search online produces yellow ribbon cookie cutters and yellow ribbon cell phone belt-pouches (see above). That probably seems absurd to many folks I know. Maybe the cell phone thing is. I laughed when I first saw it.

But then again, many Americans have no personal knowledge of the 150,000 military personnel in Iraq or Afghanistan, or even the 2 million elsewhere. There's a complete disconnect between the military families and the rest of the United States.

James Webb, the Democratic senator-elect in Virginia, discusses this subject in one of his excellent novels about Vietnam, "Fields of Fire." Webb was one of the most highly decorated Marines in Vietnam, but he wrote some dark and cynical work about the subject.

Anyway, his protagonist tells a group of college students that in Vietnam he only saw fellow soldiers who were "dudes, man. Dudes and truck drivers and coal miners and farmers."

Of the domestic situation during Vietnam, Webb described "a cultural gap that overrode any hint of generational divide."

That's what I'm talking about. A cultural gap. So many of us watch MTV's "Parental Control" or shop at the mall or even play video games about war all day, probably not thinking at all about the 3,000 folks who have died in Iraq and Afghanistan, and those who are over there today.

(Note: More Americans have died in Iraq and Afghanistan than did on September 11, 2001. Not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have come home far more prone to suicide than the average American. And then there are those who are missing a limb or limbs. Of course far more Iraqis have been hurt and killed, but I digress.)

And it's not simply cultural, it is also a class gap.

It might seem obvious that rich people do not fight wars or serve in the military, this has not always been the case. The gap is greater now than it probably ever has been. Here is an interesting set of facts:

In 1956, 400 out of 750 in Princeton's graduating class went into the military. In contrast, in 2004, 9 members of Princeton's graduating class entered the services, and [Princeton] led the Ivy League in numbers. (Emphasis added.)

But income level is not the only demcarcation. Some families seem to be military families, while others do not. Neither is better than the other, but the divide exists.

(Political scientist Peter D. Feaver and journalist Thomas E. Ricks are among the many who have produced work on this subject.)

Indifferent: good or bad?

So a lot of us don't think about these numbers every day, and maybe there's nothing wrong with that. People often do not think about war when they are not directly affected by it. That's pretty normal, and I do not judge anyone of this perspective.

But a significant chunk of America does think daily about these things, because these Americans have no choice: they have a son or a daughter or a brother over there; they were over there themselves; they were in Vietnam or another war and see a lot of similarities; they were in the military in peacetime and now realize that their experience was a cakewalk compared to combat.

So while a yellow ribbon on an SUV is a funny cliche, perhaps that person has a different perspective than yours because of what his or her family members might be enduring.

There are simply two Americas in this regard. The liberal/conservative divide has little to do with it, although both dichotomies feed off each other. The military/civilian divide, though, is more about different experiences producing opposing perspectives.