If someone came up to me and said, “I have a conflict about something,” I would not assume he meant, “I have a war [going on] about something.” This brings me to the second installment of annoying euphemism of the day. Though by the dictionary, the term conflict can be used to mean battle, it is a usage that I find insincere. A conflict arises when one has very little money, and must chose to pay either his cable bill or his high speed internet bill. The conflict arises because one can not do both, and thus has to chose one at the sacrifice of the other.

WHEN THE GLOBE’S LARGEST SUPERPOWER IS FIGHTING POOR PEOPLE WHO BELIEVE THEY ARE FREEDOM FIGHTERS IN THE 3RD WORLD, IT IS NOT A CONFLICT. IT IS A WAR.

Although I would like to say this euphemism is just a right wing trick, to keep us buying our hummers and shopping at Wal*Mart, the left is using it as well. Evidence today on the Ed Shultz show when he referred to the Iraqi war as a conflict. Let’s make no beans about it, boys and girls. With over 1,000 of our soldiers, and roughly 10x as many as their soldiers dead, what we have is a war, albeit a lopsided one.

That we can refer to the situation in Iraq as anything less than a war is simply unthinkable. Furthermore, we are told constantly, that in order to fight the WAR on terrorism, we must become more paranoid, distrustful of others, and open to the government than ever. If our WAR on terror is a war that is fought in unconventional terms, than surely poor young men and women riding in tanks and toting machine guns would qualify under the old definitions.

I believe this major euphemism is employed to cover our guilt. That is, now, we can fight war abroad and not have to sacrifice materially at home. Sure that other, vaguer war is forcing us to sacrifice what is perhaps most dear to this country, but even with our troops dying daily in foreign and hostile lands, we cry out when gas prices go up 10 cents to the gallon. Simply, those of us lucky (wealthy) enough to chose not to join the armed forces face absolutely no hardships in daily American life. We have all the exotic fruit we could possibly imagine at the local grocery store (oops, I mean Super Wal*Mart,) and plentiful supplies of sweatshop clothing from countries we couldn’t point out on maps.

We have reached the point in the consumer society whereby so long as our choice in goods and services remains at a certain acceptable level, externalities such as wars can be reduced to mere conflicts. I do like my country, for its ideals, but we have come a very long way since the 18th century. Though the easy life is now available to more people than ever, I think we have become masters of delusion. Just like Viagra may allow sex where there is no longer desire, calling war conflict only further thickens the haze that surrounds us in these 50 states.