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Although things appear to be going exceedingly well for Operation Desert Storm, wars often last longer than they're supposed to.
Abraham Lincoln believed the slave-holders' insurrection
could be suppressed in 90 days. In October of 1950, Gen.
Douglas MacArthur promised that the Korean police action
would end so soon that he could have the boys home by
Christmas
; some of them were home by Christmas of 1953.
On Jan. 14, 1963, Gen. Paul D. Harkins in Vietnam announced
that the war would be won within a year.
At dinner the other night, we were discussing what a protracted war might mean on the home front. Martha mentioned that gasoline could be rationed at some point, although that did seem too logical for the Bush regime, which would rather bomb oil refineries than conserve fuel.
Why can't they ration school?
asked Abby, our
13-year-old daughter. It takes lots of gasoline to run
school buses, and the electricity it takes to run the
schools could be used to build stuff for the war. Teachers
get called up with the reserves, and so that must be more
important than school. I'm willing to do my part, and go to
school only part-time for the duration. In fact, I think I
could handle it if they just canceled school for a
while.
She might have had motives other than patriotic sacrifice, but the idea of domestic rationing deserves further exploration.
For instance, we could ration laws, and somehow get by
with fewer statutes. That could reduce the number of
felons, thereby increasing our military manpower pool, and
it might also improve America's world image. As it stands
now, our proportion of people in prison is higher than any
other industrial nation's. We're even ahead of South Africa
and the Soviet Union, both widely regarded as police
states. That's an odd place to be number one for the
land of the free.
Rationing laws means we could also ration lawyers, something no reasonable person could oppose. We could also ration television for the duration.
Granted, CNN has done an amazing job, complete with live coverage from Baghdad. But even there, you see mostly aimless chatter as correspondents pass coverage back and forth. None of them has any news, but they're all trying to stay on camera for as long as possible.
That's a waste of everyone's time, and some TV coverage
is rather deceptive. On KUSA news, Ed Sardella was
ensconced in the Gulf Crisis Center,
as if he were
in some special nerve center with access to special
information denied to other mortals. Odds are that he was
actually in a corner of the set, sitting next to a wire
service machine and watching CNN. But that didn't stop the
other anchors from interviewing him as though he were a
genuine expert, instead of a mere broadcaster who had just
read the wires.
Ration TV to two hours a day. That's enough time to present coherent broadcasts, and during the other 22 hours, we could be productive, sociable citizens, instead of drones staring at the tube. The networks won't really mind, since they must be losing huge amounts of money with these round-the-clock ad-free broadcasts.
Television, laws, schools -- cutting back might be tough, but there's a war on, and we've all got to make sacrifices, no matter how painful.
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