Growing up in a military family, I was told countless times that my father was “off fighting for our freedom,” a phrase any child with a parent in the armed forces knows all too well. Despite never really knowing where he was or what he was actually doing, I grew up admiring men like my father, who spent years deployed in war zones around the world. I thought that war was, and would always be, a necessary evil.
Did I support the evil regimes we were fighting abroad? Of course not. Like my father, I just wanted to be a good American.
Every time a talking head or partisan pundit tried to spin the war effort as the solution to some never-before-seen threat, I cheered. I allowed the press, hawkish politicians, and my own delusions of militaristic altruism to conflate support for endless war and intervention with love for my country. It wasn’t until a small-town conservative doctor from Texas named Ron Paul called out the failings of interventionism on the presidential debate stage against former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani that my political awakening began. From that moment on, I became relentless in my pursuit of truth, and it eventually led me to an-anti war position.
After entering college, I was lucky enough to encounter a new group on campus called Young Americans for Liberty, where I met young people who believed in individual liberty and property rights, and were skeptics of American interventionism, what I now call “the Empire.” Until then, I had looked at our country’s constant involvement overseas as a call-to-action for the brave men and women of our country to defend our precious American values, rather than the political hubris it really was.
Looking at the deteriorating situations abroad in places such as Iraq and Afghanistan, this facade began to erode before my very eyes. Pro-war pundits and politicians betrayed the trust of the American people, using fear to push us into surrendering our pocketbooks and our liberties, and for too many veterans, their livelihoods. I realized that truly respecting our veterans and service members requires taking the utmost caution before putting them in harm’s way.
After years of working with my college’s YAL chapter, I’ve seen more and more young people waking up to this reality. And the pro-war political establishment did this to themselves.
They preyed upon people’s better nature. Every heart-wrenching tragedy was met with even greater callousness as they side-stepped grieving mothers, watched as families were struck by tragedy, and relentlessly stoked fear in the hearts of the American people. Victims of tragic attacks such as 9/11 were used as fodder for warmongering masked as heroism.
I now see just how brave Ron Paul really was when he stood on stage in South Carolina and spoke the truth about America’s chronic addiction to military adventurism. We stepped foot into Afghanistan at the tail end of 2001, and by 2003, hawks were already doing everything to plunge us into yet another war in Iraq, a war which, years later, would be exposed as a massive failure based on an exaggerated threat.
The good news: Their narrative is falling apart.
Students like me are pushing back across the country. We’re waging a war of our own, a war against big government and the apparatus it uses to ravage our pocketbooks, destroy our liberties, and leave crying mothers with folded flags in hand. Increasingly, young people faced with the costs of endless American intervention abroad are asking: Was this for the good of the American people, or was this for the good of the Empire?
Logan Edge is a student activist with Young Americans for Liberty at Georgia Southern University.
