Why is it that the innocent are always the ones to suffer?
I’m with Woody Allen, “The meek shall inherit the earth — right in the teeth.” And I’m with Howard Zinn, “There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.
I did some flying last week. I breezed through TSA at Bismarck International because, well, it’s Bismarck. I know some of the TSA agents in my hometown. “Haven’t seen you for a while,” one man will say if I haven’t been on that punishing dawn flight to Denver for a few weeks. “Where are you headed this time?” This time, I lingered at TSA because there was no one in line behind me. I asked, “How are you all holding up? You’re still working, but I understand that you are not being paid.” “No, nothing,” he said. “And yet you are still showing up for work?” “Yeah, but I don’t know how I am going to make rent.”
I
There are approximately 50,000 TSA employees in America. The average salary is about $46,000 per year. They’ve been working without pay for more than a month now. That’s about $3,800 in lost (or postponed) wages per agent. So far, only a few hundred have quit in disgust or desperation, but the number calling in sick or just not showing up for work is rising quickly.
TSA agents are perhaps not America’s favorite public employees, but they are good men and women, no different from hairdressers, teachers, insurance brokers, plumbers, or car salesmen. They are not being paid because they are caught in the middle of a partisan squabble in Congress that has absolutely nothing to do with the important work they do to secure American airspace for the 45,000 flights per day (17 million per annum).
The TSA agents are merely collateral damage for a partisan battle in Congress over the behavior of ICE agents and Secretary Kristi Noem’s $200 million television ad campaign to convince illegal aliens to self-deport. It would be interesting to know exactly how many undocumented individuals have left the country after seeing her stern warnings from atop a horse at Mount Rushmore, looking more like Annie Oakley than a public servant of the United States.
Why should the innocent be made to suffer for the dysfunction of Congress? Ask yourself if you are more or less safe in the friendly skies when the men and women who exist to protect us are overworked, underpaid, exhausted, taken for granted, anxious about losing their homes or cars, and treated like political pawns.
Why not pass a simple bill restoring back pay to all TSA agents (and any other federal employees caught in this partisan vice), plus interest? Better yet, how about a law that fines members of Congress $10,000 for every day that they do not come to a compromise and fund the Department of Homeland Security? We’d have compromise legislation within 72 hours.
Members of Congress are paid $174,000 per year. It has been a very long time since any of them had to sit at the kitchen table, wondering how they were going to make rent, pay for groceries, or put athletic shoes on their children. It is clear that our senators and representatives have no idea what basic financial anxiety feels like. Moreover, they enjoy an excellent health care program in which you, the taxpayers, subsidize 72-75% of the costs.
II
Now think about those 170 Iranian schoolgirls who were doing what school children do all over the world on February 28, when suddenly a Tomahawk missile blew them into gobbets and shattered their families’ lives. One minute, they were learning to read and do math, the next minute they were killed by an errant missile. Out of the blue. On the first day of a war their country didn’t start.
The war against Iran will end someday, but the Iranian people will never forget that the first thing that happened to them was a slaughter of innocents in Minab. If you think they will regard this as an errant missile, an unfortunate accident, think again.
Things like this can happen in war. We all understand that. What I don’t understand is why the United States did not acknowledge what it had done, take full responsibility, express deep regret, pledge that it would investigate the incident rigorously, and make restitution to the families of the slain. That’s what responsible nations do.
Not us. To hear the president of the United States saying on national and international television that the American-made Tomahawk missile was quite likely launched by the Iranians themselves, because (listen to the logic) Tomahawks are “sold and used by other countries” and Iran “also has some Tomahawks,” is morally obscene. For which of us is a statement like this not an appalling failure of basic decency and moral responsibility?
The innocent are made to suffer, and the complicit tell lies.
The incident made me immediately think of Picasso’s magnificent painting Guernica, about a German air raid on the Basque town of Guernica on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso’s monumental painting has become an anthem for the suffering of the innocent of the world.
III
Now think of the eleven million people of Cuba. The average Cuban is apolitical, just as the average American and the average British citizen are apolitical. In other words, Cubans mostly just want to live their lives: raise their children, put food on the table, make their way to work, take care of their elderly parents, maybe have a little extra for some recreation.
Last week, the entire electric grid of Cuba broke down in the wake of America’s January 3, 2026, military incursion into Venezuela, which was providing the fuel to keep Cuba’s power plants operating. For the last two years, Cuba has been unable to get the oil and natural gas it needs to keep the power on for its beleaguered citizens. This is not because Cuba is badly governed, but because the United States enforces a blockade designed to bring the country to its knees for the purpose of regime change. There are plenty of entities willing to sell oil to Cuba if the U.S. would just get out of the way.
For more than 60 years, beginning with Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, we have had our boot on the neck of the Cuban people. Our hostilities have not brought the desired reforms or regime change. If anything, our aggressions have served to consolidate power in the often corrupt Cuban government and caused the Cuban people to stand by a regime they do not much like because it is under siege from an outside aggressor. What proof is there that the kind of economic pressure we put on other people of the world (Iran, Russia, North Korea, Cuba) makes life so intolerable that they finally rise up and overthrow their governments? Can historians name a single instance where this has worked? In other words, you can, if you work hard enough at it, make life nearly unbearable for the Cuban people without being able to topple their government.
Here, too, the innocent are made to suffer in a grand geopolitical game engineered by foreign policy makers who seem impervious to basic logic and undeniable human pain and deprivation.
I’ve been to Cuba twice in the last three years for extended visits. The Cuban people live so close to the bone that you can only feel deep sadness for their plight. The guests on my cultural tours took scores of small soaps, shampoos, and feminine hygiene products to hand out to those most in need. Fidel Castro (1926-2016) was our chief irritant, and he has been dead for almost 10 years. His brother Raul is 94 years old and has largely stepped down from his role as Fidel’s successor. The existing government of Cuba is not one America can admire, but we all know that we have learned to live with a range of horrific governments worldwide so long as they conform to American demands. We did not seek regime change in Venezuela in January; we merely replaced one leader of a corrupt regime with another more likely to do our bidding. The same plan was surely intended for Iran, and if we invade Cuba, you can expect no more or less.
We should have worked to normalize relations with Cuba long ago. The island is no threat to the United States. If we had followed the policy of “constructive engagement,” which we used successfully with South Africa in the 1980s, we’d probably have neutralized Cuba long ago and possibly brought it more into the community of western hemispheric nations. The Cubans do not hate Americans, but they have plenty to say about our government.
Even if our economic embargo had worked to topple the Castro regime, how could we justify making the lives of 11 million innocent Cubans intolerable for two full generations?
IV
Finally, we Americans in the homeland are secure from reprisals by the government of Iran — at least so far. What is happening over there is taking place halfway around the planet in a country most Americans would have a hard time placing on a map. Given the pitiful attention span of most of the American people and our characteristic indifference to the world beyond our shores, the war in Iran is asymmetrical in a characteristically American way. Besides December 7, 1941 (Honolulu) and 9-11 (New York and the Pentagon), the United States has been able to carry war elsewhere in its 250-year history without being attacked at home. That’s surely one reason why we permit our government to undertake one ruinous foreign war after the next.
But … with this war, gasoline prices have already spiked dramatically, and more are to come. The choke point of the Strait of Hormuz is going to rock the entire world’s economy, for months if not for years, and average Americans (about 330 million of us) can expect higher food prices, higher housing costs, higher heating bills, higher automobile prices, and much more. People who are already reeling from inflation in the post-Covid years, the spike in health care insurance, and the crippling interest payments on the $40 trillion national debt are going to find their family budgets strained, sometimes to the breaking point. For many Americans, the price spikes are annoying, but we pay them, grumble, and get on with our lives. But for tens of millions of less fortunate Americans, these price spikes create real pain and hardship.
Why should the innocent be made to suffer for a war they didn’t demand or authorize?
I’ve been arguing for the last 16 months that “elections matter.” But I am quite sure that when the American people went to the polls in 2024, they did not vote to authorize this war. Not only did candidate Trump assure us hundreds of times on the campaign trail that he was going to turn away from America’s “endless wars,” but, thanks to the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, we have a constitutional mechanism explicitly designed to prevent this president (or any other) from leading us into war without first making the case to the American people and letting our elected representatives wrestle with all of the possible implications: what can go wrong; hidden costs; the laws of unintended consequences; fiscal responsibility; our relationship with NATO, the European Union, our allies around the world, and the United Nations; the inevitability of collateral damage; our standing in the international community; and our preparedness. Only when a potential war is properly vetted and authorized by the U.S. Congress do We the People — the sovereign — have the opportunity to let our elected representatives know our intentions. The Founders called that “the will of the people.”
The American people have been denied their critically important role in deciding when and under what circumstances we go to war. And yet it is the people who will pay the price in (for some, debilitating) economic strain. If the American people had been clamoring for war against Iran, they would essentially have “voted” for the ensuing economic havoc. But since they were not even informed, much less consulted, they are now the innocent victims of a leader and a government that do not seem to have much respect for the niceties of democracy or the U.S. Constitution. They can express their displeasure in November if they wish, but in the meantime, there will be some very hard discussions at the kitchen table about which bills can be paid and which will have to be postponed. And unlike the TSA agents, there will be no financial restitution when this all ends.
When he was asked to comment on the spike in gasoline prices, President Trump said, “I don’t have any concern about it.” And then he added, “the United States is the largest oil producer in the world, by far, so when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money.” The president certainly did not have the innocent American consumer in mind when he spoke those words.”
Right in the teeth!