Are We At War?

If you walk down the street today do you feel like you are at war? Like in the Blitz do you see corpses, ruined houses, men in uniform everywhere? I doubt you do. War has become removed from the civilian population at large, it has no impact. I can't holiday in Iraq but I wouldn't have done that before anyway. I can still travel where I want, do what I want, buy what I want. War impinges on my life only in the time I am willing to spend looking at it or watching the TV. Its a distant thing with little to no basis in my own physical existence.

And that is one of the reasons we have for total apathy in this country. People don't care because the war seems like a foreign affair, removed from us and untouchable. It doesn't really bother us so why care? Both pro and anti war movements are outnumbered by the generally bored, the unopinionated, the drifters. Life has reached a point where you don't have to have opinions because nothing that bad is happening. In the Cold War we might have been nuked or invaded at any moment. A real threat existed. For homosexuals there was the possibility of arrest. Foreigners were abused because so many of them were emigrating (pre 50's racism is often wildly overemphasised). There were issues and causes. Now peoples lives are so comfortable that they don't need to care. And in a life full of easy things it is easier not to care.

This is one of the reasons for such lack of emotion over the war. Whilst we sit comfortably we care not. Even 7/7 had limited casualties, limited impact. Terrorism and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan don't appear in our lives every day but rather occasionally, intermittently. They flicker in and out and we don't care.

Someone needs to bring the issues back to politics. We won't know what we'll be losing till we've lost it.