I grew up during the latter days of the Cold War, and as a European I was always very aware that my freedom from Soviet tyranny was guaranteed by the military might of the USA. I grew up on a diet of John Wayne movies and all that went with that. As a European child of the 1970s my barometer of heroic was the US marines in the “Sands of Iwo Jima”.
As a young man I developed a much more cynical view of US military policy, but I never lost my admiration for the service men and women who had to carry out the imperial military policy. While my generation was lost in a myopic, narcissistic, nebulous, consumerist culture those who joined the military services lived their lives by a different code.
The greatest irony is that the moronic, self centered, robbers barons of Wall Street can only plunder the world because they are protected by the incredible self sacrifice of service men and women. When Thatcher and Regan assumed that every person in society would act to protect their own self interest and encouraged us all to follow that model, as most of us did, the military upheld a different ethic.
While war is all about killing your fellow man and woman, there is at the heart of the military ethic an ancient tribal idea about self sacrifice for the common good. When compared to the self service the rest of have been up to for the last 30 years, there is something heroic about the self sacrifice of service men and women.
Scott Olsen is an idealistic young man, he joined an organization dedicated to protecting his nation and put himself in harms way for the common good. There is no doubt the war in Iraq was a half baked imperialist adventure, dreamed up by the greatest collection of cynical morons that ever governed a great country. All the negative things you can say about the Iraq war are true. And yet that does not detract from the heroic nature of Scott Olsen’s sacrifice in going to Iraq.
The Irish patriot martyr Terence McSwiney who died after 74 days on hunger strike, during the 1919-21 Irish War of Independence, said that “victory in this war will not go to those who can inflict the most suffering, but to those who can endure the most suffering”.
Cut to Oakland, October 25th 2011, there stands Scott Olsen, Marine Corp war veteran, standing in harms way, between the people and the police. Like Gandhi he does not have a gun, he is placid, bearing witness. He displayed physical and mental courage in going to Iraq. That night in Oakland he displayed moral courage. There is a strange serenity about him in the moments before he is shot.
Next moment he is on the ground with blood pumping from his head and the cops throw a flash grenade at those seeking to assist him. I don’t know why Scott Olsen captures it all so clearly for me, it’s just iconic, an image of a society at war with its finest, most idealistic young people.
Lincoln said a “house divided against itself cannot long stand”. We in the western world are now at war with our young people. They are on the streets telling us they have no future living in this system, a system that keeps many of us middle aged and elderly people in comfort. His heroic sacrifice is a measure by which our generation (I'm 48) can gauge our failure to act, when we were his age.
A very wise man about 25 years ago (a year before Scott Olsen was born) told me that for every easy decision we make now, those who come after us will have to make an equal and opposite hard decision. I thought of this when I saw Scott Olsen’s blood, he is paying the price I and my generation were too cowardly or stupid to pay. He is bearing witness to our shortcomings. His suffering calls on us all to act. He is my hero. Ooh-rah
