Don Quixote’s Thought for the Day: Bumpers for Peace

As regular readers know, I like bumper stickers and talk about them regularly.  But every now and then one will bring me up short.  Like today in the parking lot — “Senior for Peace”  For the life of me I couldn’t imagine the thought process behind spending good money to buy this sticker and put it on your car.  “Gee, if every senior would just put a Senior for Peace sticker on their bumper . . . ”  What?  The terrorists would get confused because they wouldn’t know who to target first?

Have we really learned nothing from the 60s when we all were young and stupid and believed that if we only imagined hard enough, and maybe stuck a flower in a policeman’s gun barrel, we’d bring peace and love to the whole world?  How does one get to be old enough to claim to be a senior without learning better than that?

Anyway, I’d conservatively estimate that 99% of all American seniors (excepting only the odd aging nut job or arms merchant) are for peace.  Who wants a bumper sticker that says, in effect, I agree with 99% of people my age?  The key, of course, is what price we are willing to pay for peace?  Our freedoms, our nation, our way of life, our very lives?  Conversely, what price are we willing to pay in war?  Young lives ended, bodies broken, potential for nuclear disaster? 

These are serious questions.  We ought to be giving them our serious consideration and discussion, not trivializing them with sound bites and truly meaningless, trivial bumper stickers.