America Ignorance of War

This article by Czeslaw Milosz starts out with a very powerful rhetorical question "Are Americans really stupid?". And with this he doesn't mean stupid as in dumb he means ignorant to everything, living in a bubble which he describes as people mindlessly day in and day out going to work seeing houses as natural, things that are supposed to be there, feeling their work in a factory as meaningful and integral to the world, feeling that money made at work is the all powerful force in the world and not thinking anything of it at all. But America has never really experienced anything else, he goes to show how war metamorphises all these meaningless things that we as Americans live and worship as our entire existence. He explains how war transforms the way one looks at life, how one looks at what is around and what is thought of as the norm. He uses Poland during the Nazi invasion and occupation as the example, how seeing burned out, blown up homes, bodies on the street, people being round up (their fate being inescapable and terminal) forms people's realities, and expectations of reality. All these things being common place in this society makes this is their reality, while we in America know nothing of this, promoting our foreign policy of control and "influence" as we keep the fighting "over there". We are at war with countries yet we really know nothing and have experienced none of this first hand.