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Who Can Stop a War?
On political action and owning your influence
I had my first political awakening during the Bush administration. You can tell when and how someone politicized, what the issues were in that time. There’s a subtle difference to the way we feel about the world.
I’ve always felt more kinship, so to speak, with Gen X-ers, for who share that particular political coming-of-age around the war in Iraq, the surveillance state and the military-industrial complex. For most people my age, politics became an interest around the 2016 election. Immigration, racism and rising fascism are the chief concerns. No one wants to talk much about war.
There’s a way in which I think my fellow Millennials have a healthier politics than I do. There’s a hopelessness, a cynicism, a repressed rage woven into the political mind of anyone who watched our country pour out by the tens of thousands to protest an illegal imperial war in Iraq and find ourselves utterly powerless to stop the war machine.
For those who politicized in the face of Trumpism, 2020 offered a thin sense of victory, a renewed belief in democracy, a feeling of agency and power. It offered hope. For those who politicized in the face of war, who remember the world laughing in the face of our protest, the bombs drowning out our voices, it’s harder to muster that hope…
