And we always have been.
In the first months of the Civil War hundreds of spectators traveled to Manassas, Virginia to see war for themselves. Among the crowd were congressmen, reporters, day laborers, a few ladies selling food and drink from carts they pulled. Federal troops had been preparing to cross a small stream — Bull Run — defended by a smaller force of Confederates. Union troops and spectators alike expected the battle would be brief and decisive, quickly settling the dispute and ending the war in favor of the Union.
The battle wasn’t the largest, or the bloodiest, but by the end of the day, after the Union made its charges, after Stonewall Jackson earned his reputation, the Confederates forced the Federals to retreat, and everybody’s expectations about the nature of the war changed.
This weekend, just as those Manassas spectators gathered up their picnics while the Union gathered its troops, I’m preparing to wield my bag of popcorn before the spectacle. I expected we would avert this and maybe we will. But if we don’t, let it be settled quickly, let it be decided as cleanly as we are told the men and women planning it expect it to be.
* Dunno if this is real or not, but either way it’s compelling. Almost as compelling as the war itself: Where is Raed?, a daily, more or less, blog from inside Iraq.