Post Traumatic Stress Disorder starts where trauma stops: a defense of forever wars
Netflix realized years ago the key to customer retention is to make sure nothing ever ends. Once an episode stops, the next starts before you can decide if you even liked the previous one. The rest of America can learn from this: if endless content keeps millions of people from confronting the emptiness of their evenings, endless wars can keep soldiers from confronting anything besides enemy and civilian forces.
During war, everything—except enemy structures—is brilliantly structured. There are objectives, acronyms, Powerpoints, buff men yelling at you… Even the hardest man cannot ask questions there! War is traumatic, sure, but you are not yet post-trauma. Only after hearing a jar of pasta sauce shatter in a Giant Eagle does a man realize he remembers exactly what a burning person smells like. The obvious solution, then, is to make sure he’s never past the point where burnt hair, diesel fumes, and the copper-sweet taste of blood are still commingling in his throat, drowning out any semblance of emotion.
There are, admittedly, some logistical concerns. Critics will claim endless war is expensive. Of course it is! As Keynes will tell you, you’ve got to spend money to make money. Raytheon employees get to cover their mortgages, Teledyne executives can send their children to colleges with buildings named after other executives, and every civilian killed creates two factory openings back home.
Naturally, there are social benefits too. Without war, Americans would start talking about even more expensive, dangerous things like healthcare or infrastructure. A military operation gives the public something healthier to focus on, such as the map of a country they first heard of eight minutes ago. Why, just the other day I was introduced to this exotic land known as “Slava Ukraine!”
The crux of my argument, then, is that war is purpose: Politicians get to act seriously and young people get to find employment. Peace, in contrast, asks us what comes next. It offers us neither ribbon nor bandage, nor existential silence nor frantic energy. Everything is moderate, uncertain, uninteresting, un-American. All this soul-searching only yields more questions.
War already has another answer.
Another war.