By David Jonas

Often, in times of national military conflict, it is proper to unite as a common people, to engage in mutual sacrifice and to subvert our individual wants for the greater good of country and mankind. We, in every walk of life, tempered by our shared beliefs, come together and pave a path with which we can benefit our great Republic and still do our best to support the young men and women who are more than willing to give their lives to protect our freedoms.

Thank God we don’t have to go through that shit for this war! The days of us normal Americans having to make any personal sacrifice are over! And I for one could not be more ecstatic. I myself have family members in the Marines right now, and the great burden of calling them and writing them e-mails is starting to lower my morale.

Indeed, nearly all members of our government and media will agree with me, if not in their words, but their well-thought-out actions and practices. Our fine friends in the federal government have led the charge with what would seem to be a no-brainer: when you’re at war, make sure you cut taxes for the wealthy. From Alexander to Napoleon to Herbert Hoover, those great leaders understood that if you want to win a war, you have to tongue the sweaty nutsack of the aristocracy.
Hey, David Jonas, your brothers and sisters are being shipped to Iraq, one in seven will be wounded or killed, would you like $60,000 back in non-taxed dividends and capital gains for allowing your father to use your bank account as a tax shelter!? Why, Mr. Congress, I would! Would a soldier in Iraq be better off using that money for some basic armor? Probably! Am I going to send him or her a check? I very much doubt it!
I’ll buy some American flag decals with that money. That’ll show those wily terrorists, who by the way, must be fought in Iraq or we’ll be fighting them here. Because we all know it is technically impossible for one terrorist to be in two places at the same time. Two terrorists, I don’t even want to talk about.

The media too has done an incredible job in helping us with our great burden of moral responsibility. NBC’s Nightly News deserves a special shout-out for their efforts. Never afraid to shy away from controversy, I observed that their broadcasts from Feb. 13th through the 17th contained a bold three minutes total coverage of Iraq, while the Olympics, which NBC proudly profits off of as their sole broadcaster, got barely 28 minutes out of a possible 150 minutes. Commercials took up a meager 41 minutes.
One could view this as a sign that there’s nothing bad going on Iraq, thus no bad news to report. During that span, eight American soldiers died in combat in Iraq.
Then again, snow-boarding is pretty cool. It must be, NBC devoted eight minutes of coverage to it alone in that same span.

But the true heroes of the media are my good friends at Fox News. Brit Hume (or Uncy-Brit as I and his other nephews call him) did this country a great service in October when he noted that “by historic standards, these casualties (in Iraq) are negligible.” Which is absolutely true. By last count, 2,296 Americans have died from combat in Iraq, which is roughly .02 percent of the 10 million Soviets who died in World War II. Brit even considered the NEOD Adjustments (Nationality and Ethnic Origin of Death). For those who slept through class, I’ve outlined them below:
One dead American soldier= 44 dead Iraqis (assuming 100,000 total) = 4,393.6 really dead Soviets = 1/24th of American snowboarder Shaun White.
And when you look at it that way, you can’t really feel bad for anyone.

Even I, a spoiled, soulless satirist, am doing my part in helping us ignore the Iraq War and to better focus on our petty, yet, oddly-gratifying personal problems. With no draft or moral imperative to force me into the military, I can sit idly by, writing for my student newspaper, and not feel a tinge of sympathy for those who have lost loved ones. Those lost and those grieving are fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, husbands and wives who all gave their lives and their sorrow for people who, like me, see their profound sacrifice, shed a tear, and stay tuned for more coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino.