It’s been over 40 years since LBJ refused to choose between Guns and Butter, and we all came out losers because of it. Had he chosen only Guns, fewer Americans would have paid an economic price, and had he settled on Butter alone, its likely America would not have sacrificed at all. But LBJ couldn’t make that choice; instead he told America you can have this war and eat butter too. Thousands of Americans kept dying in Viet Nam and ultimately butter, along with all consumer goods and services, soared in price in an inflationary spiral until many Americans could barely afford to put margarine on their tables.

We are not exactly fighting a second Viet Nam War now, though Iraq is the closest thing to it for America since Saigon fell. Our military deployment in Iraq remains a fraction of the half a million Army of predominantly draftees that the United States once shipped off to war in South East Asia. Without a draft, most American families don’t have to worry themselves sick over whether their sons, and potentially now their daughters, will be shipped off to fight in a war they want no part of. With less troops fighting in Iraq than once fought in Viet Nam, it means there are fewer overall casualties also, which means less funerals for those of us at home to attend for the children of friends, neighbors and co-workers fallen in combat, far less than the bloodier days of the Viet Nam era. So much pain averted, for most of us.

Pain is nature’s way of saying change the course. Without the feedback of pain, a person fast asleep could be burned to a crisp without ever knowing it. Without the feedback of pain, a person might not realize that the bramble they were walking deeper into was ripping at their flesh. Pain is often an urgent warning to proceed at one’s very real own risk, but some dangers are more difficult to sense than others. In the days of old, coal miners brought canneries with them into the mines where they worked, because silent and odorless gases could accumulate in those shafts to a lethal degree before a miner could notice in time. They could notice a dead canary though, one killed by gathering gasses still below a level deadly to humans, but only if they took the time to look at that canary, it didn’t come looking for them.

America’s pain from Iraq is muted now, because of tax cuts for the rich that say; “Why sacrifice anything?” Our pain from Iraq is muted now, because of a rampant culture of consumption that says “Buy Now, and maybe you won’t have to pay later”. Most Americans aren’t being asked to sacrifice much of anything now, because of the War in Iraq, so most Americans don’t directly feel pain from it. Yet.

There is an eerie growing sense of unease, a wooziness in the head perhaps, as the gases accumulating in the Neocon dug mine that we have been led into build toward increasingly dangerous levels, but nothing that is piercing in intensity, nothing piercing enough to trigger an alarm over what soon will lay in store for us if we do not change this course. Continuing Neocon mining in the Middle East is disrupting that regions geography, more and more deadly gasses are being released. Now they accumulate inside Iraq, but they are seeping from a wider region, with new pockets forming in Syria, in Lebanon, in Saudi Arabia and Palestine, and in Iran. And when storm winds start to blow they drift closer to Europe and North America as well.

The American public has been temporarily buffered from the full sharp pain of war; the piper has not been paid yet, merely given an I.O.U. But we still have one canary inside the Neocon Coal Mine, if only we are willing to look to see it suffer. That canary is America’s volunteer military. It is the men and women who go where they are sent, no matter how dangerous the destination that awaits them. They are the Americans first placed in harms way. They are the first one’s to sacrifice; they are the first ones to die. And if it goes poorly for them, and if that warning is not heeded, then the rest of us will surely sacrifice next. Watching our volunteer military break in Iraq is watching our canary struggle for breath, while we continue to set off explosives in unstable terrain as the Neocon coal mine grows steadily deeper.

I watched General Wesley Clark address the DNC winter meeting. I saw him pointing to the canary in the coal mine.