My survey will have to wait for another day as it turns out. I am sharing an apartment now with my daughter and her boyfriend, and it seems Memorial Day is a bit of a tough time for a soldier. He just found out a couple guys he knows have been killed, and this is just not the right day for him to be doing anything- we're staying home today. This is a person I'm coming to know fairly well, and it certainly has had an impact on how I view the war.
Spiker, I wasn't very clear in my earlier posts but economics is just a trigger. Some of the fallout from the loss of jobs in Ohio and Michigan is that we have a disproportionate amount of young people who can't find work who are enlisting, feeling they have no better options. The recruiting methods in these areas are completely shameful and disgusting- they just outright lie to these poor young people, promising them everything under the sun. We've had newsmen with hidden cameras expose their clearly illegal methods, but nobody makes them stop.
Families swell with pride as their youth join an honourable cause and join the ranks of their fathers and grandfathers, cheerful sendoffs usher them out. Then reality sets in. This ISN'T an honourable cause. They aren't getting much accomplished. Young people are finding out quickly that what they believed about Iraq when they were at home is not quite what they find when they get there. Mothers gets sad calls that their children are not coming home instead of stories of bravery in war- they weren't expecting that.
Money's tight, your kids are dead, they died for not much of anything really- and YOU sent them off. How long do you think it will be before we start seeing a rash of suicides?
Turn on the news, and the safe city where you raised your family now reads the LIST of murders and shootings that happened in your city today on the nightly news. You didn't move, you didn't do anything wrong, things just got horrible around you while you were sitting there living your life.
You turn to your church for comfort, a church that has led you through many years of life's trials and tribulations. You know most of the people there, they are your friends. You don't go there to challenge the current scientific thoughts or to push forward political agendas, you go there for comfort. You want peace and love. You get propaganda in no small measure along with the small sliver of love you're led to believe you can have if ONLY you can jump high enough. So you jump. Your preacher may not even be a dick, he may be getting his ideas from sources that just really don't have HIS best interest in mind either. Nomatter how you look at it, these ideas are not coming from a loving God or creator. You just can't take one more thing being wrong, you can't handle not being able to trust the one thing in your life that's always been there for you. If your church isn't "right", then nothing else is either. That's not a possibility that a whole culture of basically depressed people can contemplate. They'd rather stab you in the eye than contemplate it.
That's my whole opinion, it's far from just economic.
edit- what Blocko said. Ditto.