Innocent?

I've been trying to formulate a thorough dissection of the President's speech from last night. But there are far too many points to try to do it all in one long and probably boring post. Instead, I might just slip in bits and pieces over the course of the week. For example....

I have not heard many people comment on this yet but the following line from the speech immediately caught my attention:

"As a country, we are not as young – and perhaps not as innocent – as we were when Roosevelt was President."

The question that leapt to my frontal lobe was - what does he mean by "not as innocent" ?

Is this yet another reference to the mistakes he says this nation has made? Is this another sly jibe aimed at the Bush administration? And what exactly is this doing in a speech that is supposed to rally our country towards war?

Even more more importantly - does the President actually contend that our country was "innocent" in the 1930s when compared with what has followed?

If this is the case, then we have a bigger problem on our hands. We have a leader who doesn't even know the history of his own country. In fact, this is a clear example of what I have been railing against in this entire blog - our citizens have no sense of our country's history or what it means to be an American, of the responsibility that comes with our freedoms. And this lack of civic awareness was on full display last night.

Just of the the top of my head, before the 1930s our country had had legalized slavery, subjugated women for over a century and killed or ran off the Native Americans as part of the land expansion. Then under FDR, we imprisoned Japanese Americans, still had a segregated military, carpet bombed civilian targets and dropped atomic weapons on whole cities.

And our President is trying to say we were more "innocent" back then?

Understand, I am not even passing judgments on some of these things. The slavery and other issues are no brainers. But the way we fought our wars, especially in World War II demonstrated a totally different mindset on the part of our leaders and citizens and it definitely can NOT be described as one of innocence.

It was actually a steely resolve to win the war, to do what was necessary to defeat our enemies and achieve victory.

The fact that our President would utter the word "innocent" in the context belies a fundamental misunderstand of our history as well as what it actually takes to win a war.

This also demonstrates that he is definitely a product of our current society - one that has lost it's martial culture, it sense of strength, its appreciation of the demands of citizenship and the understanding of self-sacrifice for the good of the country.

And much of this - and the reason I have decided to ramble on every night to no one in particular - can be attributed to the abolition of the draft and the movement to an all-volunteer military.

Once the vast majority of the population was allowed to escape their responsibility to contribute to the common defense of our nation, our country started to forget what it meant to go to war. It forgot the sacrifices it required. It forgot the kind of commitment it needed from the people and especially from it's leaders.

Ultimately, this country forgot how to win.

And there is nothing "innocent" about this.

The right word would be WEAK.

And, if we continue down this road, the right word might be DEFEATED.