Iraq, ironically, brings us together

So we're now over a week into this war. And it's bringing America closer together by the day. No, I don't mean its creating political consensus or ideological harmony. No, I don't mean everyone's for it. One glance at the maelstrom-creating rallies happening in almost all of our major cities and one realizes the political cacophony in this one. Oh yeah . . . and the U.N.? Divided as ever. But what is happening is sociological cohesion in America.

A fellow classmate who I hardly know asks me in the bathroom if I heard anything new about the events of the war. The Frist TV room is three times as full on a daily basis than it has been prewar. The pages of Princeton's newspaper and magazine articles are slowly becoming indistinguishable from one another to the cursorily-inclined headline reader who sees only "Iraq this" and "Iraq that" on their pages.

This is what I mean by sociological cohesion. People are talking more, congregating more, and thinking more about a common topic. And the above examples are all within our gated University which usually slumbers in a bed of political apathy unmatched by almost any other social institution.

In the "non-Princeton" world people are talking louder, congregating in greater numbers, and thinking harder about the same common topic. A barbershop in New York City rings with the voice of a news-reporter in Iraq on one of the 24-hour news channels, while clients' hair-shedding heads stay fixed to the common screen projecting the common topic. Even the little television set in the local bank I walked into this week was reporting on the common topic instead of its usual spewing forth of promotional junk.

So in this saga that we are experiencing, some will rally around an antiwar movement, and others around a hawkish "we're kicking their ass" mentality, but all are engaging in a dialogue about the same topic. The actual topic of the dialogue is less interesting to me than the existence of the vast discussion itself, that is precisely why I keep referring to the war as a "topic."

This dialogue is facilitated through various mediums such as articles and university discussions, but I argue that for the vast majority of the actors in this saga, it is through the conduit of the television. That "Joe Millionaire" crap was just a ploy to actively try to create such a dialogue around a central topic — this, on the contrary, is the real deal. The tubes of America are all linking to the similar set of news channels reporting on the topic. The voices and pictures of the tubes are constantly reminding Americans that something is going on that is common to all of them.

The advent of 24-hour news has allowed the television to exert its congealing force deep into the post-midnight hours. It allows the Princeton student who is starving for a greater identity than that of a Princetonian to turn onto the MSNBC network channel at 3 in the morning and know that he is connected to the same topic as is the rest of his country. It allows the blue-collar worker in Idaho who can't sleep because he cannot make enough money to feed his family to do the same thing.

I know that people are dying in this war and I know that the war is probably being exploited by media marketing teams from Atlanta to Los Angeles. But the objective reality of a topic-induced social cohesion is making people around America feel good. Many, especially the sanctimonious, will not admit to this and it might be subconscious, but being part of an ongoing drama, an ever-unfolding dialogue that is common to all, has its value.

What is going on is a social phenomenon that is quite natural, and actually quite healthy for a society to experience from time to time. This is not to say that we should provoke more wars to create such cohesive movements. That would be the most perverse Utilitarian argument I have ever heard. But it is to say that there is a prima facie good that lives besides the bloody destruction of war overseas, a good of social cohesion around a common topic that just happens to be war.

It even feels like the journalist giants, Rather, Brokaw and Jennings have become more of our personal friends in this ongoing drama, as they are communicating with us in hours during which we are not used to having them in our living rooms. And every time they reveal an ever-so-subtle emotion like when a plane goes down or a marine gets killed, they strike a common nerve with us — us the people on the other side of the electrical conduit of cohesion.

Steven Kamara is a politics major from Manhasset Hills, N.Y.