I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

I found a site where they publish votes. http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists. You can go there and see who voted for what and see yea's and nay's grouped.

The newspapers ar strangely quiet about this debt-ceiling thing. I didn't know that the House no longer votes on these things, but just automated the process of raising it when needed. Too much to be bothered with, I suppose, controlling the national debt. The Senate hasn't automated this yet, so they have to vote.

I knew the debt was close to $6 trillion when Bush took office, but I didn't know that he'd been back to the till quietly 3 times to raise it another $3 trillion. And $2 trillion of that is for Iraq. How d'you feel about that, then? $2 trillion for this war? Every man, woman, and child in the US now owes something like $30,000 for their share of the US debt, and your individual bill for Iraq is $6,600. Got a spouse? That'll be $13,200 for the both of you. No family discounts on debt, please.

Get your head around that number for a second. $6,600. That's more than the state of California budgets to educate my child each year. That's the upper limit on my platinum card. Hey, that'll just be many years of payments of $100 per month for the war, please.

And this brings me to a decidedly uncomfortable place. Just what is my position on this war?

Well, obviously, I am against it. Everybody before me has made better arguments as to why this should be the case. I won't repeat them.

But here's a place where I hit discomfort.

Do I support the troops?

Most people I know are against the war, but feel hey, we gotta' support the troops. It's not their fault they're serving our country at precisely the moment it decided to engage in political insanity. It's not their fault they're pawns of the bureaucratic machine. It's not their fault they're doing something good, i.e., serving us, protecting and defending freedom, but just got sent to the wrong place.

Hmmmm..

If it were 1966 and we were having this talk, I'd be tempted to nod my head and agree. Yeah, it's not their fault. It's the government.

But it's 2006, and we had Vietnam, and we now all know that the US government doesn't think twice about sending poor and stupid boys off to die for unworthy causes. Before you explode with anger over that choice of adjectives, let me explain. My ex-husband served in Vietnam, as a soldier in the army. It took him all of five minutes to figure out that the vast majority of the army was made up of underclass and under-educated boys. He was in college, but had missed out on a class and that made him eligible for the draft, to his complete horror. He could go to OCS, but declined because he wanted to be out ASAP, and being a foot soldier got you out faster than being an officer. Once he was dropped into the war, he saw that there weren't any well-educated upper class soldiers running around out there in the jungle. He knew it was a poor boy's war, and since he was a poor boy from Macon, Ga., that made him quietly seethe inside.

This government has been carefully and quietly targeting black, Latin, and poor white youths who probably don't have much of a future without armed service. There are gorgeously shot ads on TV and in magazines depicting very handsome, martial young men talking to their mothers, making them proud of having a son who serves. This is a very manipulative machine we are working with, and who can blame these youths for signing up?

I can. Wow, this is going to be a very hard position to hold. But let me try it.

I can look troops in the eye, who've signed up since we began this war, and honestly ask them what they think they are doing. Don't they know they will be killing people, pulling people who may have done nothing out of their homes for interrogation? Don't they know they will be violating the rights of a people who are in so much dissaray that it's hardly likely they can organize anything at the moment, save a steady stream of hatred for their 'liberators'? Do they honestly believe they are being dispatched to do anything more than secure oil so that the US can continue to generate the vast majority of the world's pollution, and feed its taste for giant gas guzzling vehicles? Can you in any way translate this to making the world a better place for all people? Are you aware that there is no 'liberation' going on, and that this is an excuse to frankly colonialize another country outright?

Yeah, I think they do know that. The finer points may elude them. Philosophy may elude them. But I think at the end of the day they know they are going to shoot people, hurt people, and carry out an operation that has very little to do with giving a nation freedom. So if they sign up to go, it's not because they are protecting this country, defending our freedom, and all that. They know they are going over there to hurt people whose crime is having been born in the wrong spot in the world at this particular time. There aren't any illusions left about that now.

My friend is dating a soldier, a special forces guy, who just went. He enlisted last year. He could read the papers. He could figure out what was up. He's 30, hardly a kid. He enlisted. She's against the war. She feels conflicted. She supports him because he feels he's doing something great for his country.

What is that, exactly?

For those who enlisted, and then got stuck in this war before it was known that there was going to be a war, this is a terrible conundrum, and I wish we could send you home tomorrow. For the rest of the troops, eager to sign up and serve, eager to go overseas,  I submit that you will hold guns and you will pull triggers. You are accountable for your actions, as I am, as everyone is. You should take a good look at the powers you serve, and question what they are up to. This requires you become conscious. In the end, I think we are all accountable to be conscious of what we are doing, what it creates, and what it does to us and others.

This thought brings me to an even uglier thought. The willing troops who go over there, conscious or not, are the only shield keeping the government from forcing the rest of us to go. See, if everyone objected to what we are doing in Iraq, and no one signed up, well, it would be hard to fight a war short of importing 'expendable' people from another nation, or something equally horrendous. So what would the government do?

Force the rest of us to serve. It's happened, maybe not here, but in enough other places touting democracy and freedom and great destiny. I am thinking particularly here of Nazi Germany, which eventually started sending 14 year-olds to the front lines in Europe and Asia, in the name of spreading a great society infused with democracy and freedom.

Yeah, it sounds just as hollow on this page as it did to some suspecting Germans back then.

Those troops who march off to war with bright-eyed enthusiasm and zeal are keeping the government from instituting mandated conscription. Now hopefully, if they mandated us into service, we'd fight that like mad, and push back hard, and maybe even force those bastards in DC out into the streets and start over, get some people running this country who are actually conscious and humanitarian. So mull that one over. Forced conscription might lead to revolution, and maybe that's what is needed instead of this rampant apathy we all feel that keeps us from thinking, saying, and doing anything against this madness our country is engaged in.

But I still don't support the troops. I'm sorry, but there it is. We each of us have to own what we do, and why we do it, no matter where we are on the societal ladder. Sometimes, pushing back from the bottom forces required changes all the way to the top, and I think that's what's bloody-well needed now.