Five Years Too Long
A Young American's Perspective on the War on Iraq
By Adrian Avila

March 19, 2003, I remember that day well. At the time, I was working at a fast food restaurant where many of my days were spent talking with the customers about sports, movies and other distractions that make the days go by faster. Not that day, that day was one of bad news and a gloomy future.

“We are at war now,” said a 13-year-old girl that visited the restaurant often. She told a few of us in the restaurant how her mom was informing her on what was going on. How Bush had giving the orders to go to war.       

At the time, I was 18 and I wasn't too interested in anything political or really anything that did not revolve around girls and good times, but the notion of war…wow that hit me. I remember thinking “why?” and what this war meant for me and mine.

The more immediate changes happened when the people at an organization that I worked with started making signs to end the war, protesting and having conversations about how the war was wrong and how Americans would end up paying for the war in more ways than just economic losses. I can still hear the chants “Hey hey, ho ho! This racist war has got to go!” or the oh so simple, yet effective, “No blood for oil!”

But now I sit here in my cold dim lit office five years later and think about all of the terror that has gone on in the past five years both in Iraq and here in the States.

Thousands of American lives lost, a nation in an economic decline, an Iraqi nation in total devastation, and war veterans that are not much older than me, but have seen death in ways that turn reality upside down. And yet even after the billions of dollars and lives that have gone into this so-called ” War for freedom” most of the country feels that this war or “HIS” war is a complete failure.

Same here! How have we as simple human beings let this chaos go on for five years? How? Have we the people lost out voice or does it not matter any more what we say, only how much money or political power we have?

One thing is for sure, five years is way too long, that's five years of wrongful death, reckless spending and not to mention all of the effects that will linger on even after the war is over, the effects that our children will have to deal with and maybe even their children. As Eve Merriam once said, “I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"