Iraq v. WWII

From Devilstower at Kos:

Those of us without a uniform in this fight have been asked to sacrifice by... shopping. Honestly, if Iraq and Afghanistan were to fall into the great abyss of media forgetfulness (the one that readily swallowed New Orleans), would we know we were "a nation at war?"

But the truth is, we are being asked to make sacrifices.

We're being asked to sacrifice privacy in all our communications. We've been asked to sacrifice morality. We're being asked to ransom the future of our children to pay for the national shopping spree in Iraq. Many of the sacrifices of World War II were open, shared, and in a sense, unifying. The sacrifices of today are secret sacrifices, hidden losses, that pit Americans against each other not by accident, but by design.

Perhaps the greatest sacrifice we've made on the home front is simply one of depleted attention given to things not Iraq. We all have only so many hours in our day. We all have a limited quantity of outrage we can express, before that outrage sours into ennui. I don't want to imply that the invasion in Iraq was plotted only as a distraction, but it is a distraction. And while we've kept so much of our attention focused over there, others have taken advantage of that distraction.