Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Here’s how much of your life the United States has been at war...

President Trump’s youngest son, Barron, was born in 2006, more than four years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and four years after American troops first entered Afghanistan with the goal of driving out the Taliban. Barron, in other words, has never lived in a United States where there weren’t troops fighting in Afghanistan; on Monday night, his father announced that this fight would continue.

It isn’t just Barron whose life has overlapped with a nation in conflict. In 2015, we looked at the extent to which all Americans have lived through any number of years in which the country has been at war. In light of Trump’s decision to keep that fight going, we decided to revisit the graphic at the heart of that analysis, showing how the nation’s armed conflicts have defined Americans’ lives.

At left, below, the U.S. population by birth year. (The most recent available data is from 2016.) Each bar is color-coded by the percentage of time that people born in that year have lived in a United States that has been fighting a war. At right, the breakdown of those conflicts over the span of an American’s life. The definitions here can be a little squishy, admittedly, but the general markers for when conflicts began and ended give a sense of how much of our lives the country has been at war. (For the sake of clarity, any period of conflict in a year is counted as a year at war.) Full story...

Related posts:
  1. Trump, emulate Gorbachev and get out of Afghanistan...
  2. The 16 years' war and its cost...
  3. Obama the war criminal butcherer of women and children...
  4. The real John McCain..
  5. Fifteen years into the Afghan war, do Americans know the truth?
  6. Who got us into these endless wars?
  7. Taxpayer Burden: Cost of war in Afghanistan hits $4million an hour...

No comments:

Post a Comment