Because there’s an energy crisis, we have gone to daylight savings earlier in the year. Because we’ve gone to daylight savings earlier in the year, it was still light when Adrienne and I arrived at the sidewalk in front of the Unitarian Church just before 5 p.m. for the vigil.

How many times have we done this now? I never thought it would go on this long. I’m not much of a patriot, I admit. The vigil is held every evening, but I only show up to commemorate major events, anniversaries and the rounding of yet another thousand American casualties.

There were only two elderly women standing on the curb when we arrived, but people soon arrived from several directions. Placards and banners were pulled from plastic bags. It was like watching a crew of roadies setting up for a concert, all the moves so practiced, so routine. Someone handed me a sign that said, “War is Not the Answer” on one side and “How Many More Lives?” on the other. The edges were encased with heavy packing tape; this was a sign for the long haul.

In Washington, George W. Bush said these five years of war have made the world a better place. No one believes that and few argue with this foolish man anymore or even pay much attention. We’re just waiting for him to go. Iraq is slowly sinking from our national discourse as the economy stalls and the price of gas rises again. It’s become just another ongoing, unpleasant fact of life.

The crowd on the curb eventually grew to 60 people. One man stood by a coffin with the number 3,990 on it, representing the number of American war casualties, a reminder that in a week or so, it will be time for half-hearted patriots to make another vigil appearance.

Of course, it’s all connected. We went to war for oil. Mr. Bush’s cronies botched it, badly. The trillions of dollars we’ve sunk into the quicksand of Iraq’s deserts are no longer a mere abstraction for people to argue about on the Sunday morning shows, saying we could have hired this many teachers or that many police officers or paid for social security and health care for a century.

No matter how many phony accounting methods we use, the dollars are all real and we drained them from our economy just as we’ve drained the blood of the Iraqi people and our own soldiers and in the months ahead, we will all pay a very real price for Mr. Bush’s folly.

Maybe it was the daylight savings effect, but it seemed more cars were honking in support than there had been at the previous vigils I’d attended. A surprising number of the honkers were in SUVs, a fact that did not pass unmentioned by the vigilers. Maybe we’ve turned some sort of corner when drivers in new black Lincoln Navigators honk in support of anti-war vigils.

Maybe we’re picking up the support of the Lincoln Navigator set or maybe it’s all just become a familiar piece of curbside theater – five years of war and four thousand casualties have worn a groove in American society and our wheels, both real and psychological, are caught in the track and we just follow the groove along.

John McCain wants to be the new George Bush and says we can stay in Iraq for 100 years. We can’t. Our army’s broken and now our home front is broken too by this war. The myth of American invincibility was just that – a myth. If there was any truth to it, it was that the only enemy who could defeat us was ourselves and now we have.

Great Britain declined from first to second-rate power 70 years ago, fighting a six-year war, but at least they defeated totalitarianism. After five years of war, the US is on the brink of second-rate status, but if anything, we’ve mid-wifed a rebirth of totalitarianism. Shame on us.

© Mark Floegel, 2008