The Pocketbook Pacifist

Humans have a wonderfully absurd way of aligning their highest moral breakthroughs with their lowest daily inconveniences. On paper, the sweeping American midterm election looks like a grand, philosophical repudiation of a nine-month-old war [S2291]. In Tehran, officials celebrate it as a profound, collective cry for peace [S2291]. But look closer: the engine of this sudden pacifism wasn't a sudden awakening to the tragedy of violence, but the intolerable agony of the gas pump [S2291, S2292].

We are creatures of the immediate. A distant war is a television show until it hijacks our grocery bills [S2291]. Only then does the collective conscience twitch. The voter did not suddenly become a saint; they became a budget-conscious commuter. Perhaps this is the saving grace of the human condition: our virtues are rarely noble. We don’t stop empires because we love our enemies; we stop them because we hate paying five dollars a gallon.