Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

It's really easy to focus on the wrong stuff, out of habit or anger or other reasons. I remember, eight years ago when I was entering restaurant management, a boss of mine (who was soon to be fired) decided to focus on food-cost issues in our restaurant, which were quite out of control. Food-cost is basically that: the amount of money a restaurant spends on the ingredients for the food that it prepares and serves. In our case, a Pizza Hut, this involved the dough mix, oil, cheese, sauce, toppings and all the rest. The unit I was in at the time was in the habit of discarding at least three full batches of unused dough each night -- which anyone can see is a pretty big expense -- but the manager (who was soon to be fired) focused on tiny things like the amount of ice in the beverages, the number of shakes of seasoning we put on the breadsticks, and so forth. He was concentrating to exclusion on things that had little, if any, effect on our food-cost problems and ignoring larger practices that had a big effect on those same problems. This is what the saying "Penny wise, pound foolish" means: concentrating on ways to save pennies, because pennies are often easier to track and we're simply in the habit of doing so, and not seeing the more important big things going on behind it all.

That seems to me to be what the anti-war movement is now experiencing.

I'm sympathetic, I really am. I'm one who is supporting the war, but not without a queasy fear deep in my stomach that things are going to be messed up afterwards. But the thing is, the war has begun. It's happening, and the only thing that anti-war protests -- especially civil disobedience designed to shut down, or at least hamper, major metropolitan areas -- is going to accomplish is to make the anti-war people look more and more flaky and disconnected from reality. It reminds me of the liberal commentators and bloggers who never refer to President Bush without a parenthetical comment like "You know, you weren't really elected", and it quite frankly reminds me of the conservatives who still find ways to blame the evils of the world on Bill Clinton.

So if you opposed the war, and went to the trouble of screaming your opposition at the top of your lungs, great. That's what America, and democracy, are all about. But America and democracy are also about moving on to what's next -- and in this case, the "what's next" is far, far more crucial than the war which I think everyone knows we're going to win. If the Left wants to be productive, then it seems to me that protesting the war itself needs to end; what the Left needs to do now is to start holding the Administration's feet to the coals to make sure that the post-war stuff isn't screwed up the way Afghanistan was. To keep up Bush's poker-metaphors, we on the left really need to stop crying about the hands that have gone by, because the cards are being dealt again. It's a new hand, so let's play it.