AdirondacksI’ve been on vacation all week. My family rents a cabin in the Adirondacks every August (from these folks). It’s pretty neat; I’ve been going up there since I was a kid, and now I take my own kids up there. We swim, fish, cook out, let the kids run around and have fun, let them explore the world in their sweet, childlike, innocent way… we let them do stuff like deliberately slam their fingers into a door so they can see what happens — then we have a fun family trip to the emergency room, and when we find out nothing is actually broken, we all have a good laugh and then Daddy wonders aloud why he can’t just have a damn quiet beer in peace and Mommy hisses “maybe if you weren’t drunk all the time the kids wouldn’t always be ending up in the hospital!” and then Daddy sullenly remembers reading A Long Day’s Journey into Night and thinking “man, I wish I had a nice happy family life like that”…

Oh, I’m kidding. (The 1-year-old did do that thing with the cabin door, but he was OK, though it was alarming to see the finger swell up to twice its usual size, but nothing was broken, thank Jebus.) We had a lovely time. Indeed, by and large I was not online at all, not reading newspapers, and just blissfully unaware of any damn thing happening in the world. At night the wind would sigh through the tall Adirondack pines, and that’s the most peaceful sound in the universe — nothing compares, in my experience. Pure calm. Just you and the natural world, the healthy aroma of the woods and the lake, your loved ones close to you asleep or reading, no TV, no damn telephones, no email, no nothing. Human existence. You & nature, y’know? The way it’s supposed to be.

But of course, as many before me have lamented, the way things are supposed to be are not remotely the way things are. On the way home this afternoon we stopped at a Burger King, because the 7-Year-Old wanted one of the Simpsons toys in their kids’ meal giveaways — a worthy desire, I thought, one which trumped my usual leeriness about giving the little ones fast food. (As it turns out, he & his sister got a talking Nelson Muntz, and so for the next few hours all we heard in the car was dueling Nelson “Ha-Ha!”s. Which was pretty hellish, thank you very much.)

Anyway, outside the restaurant I saw in a newspaper machine the following headline:

Upstate NY departments, state police feel ammunition pinch

While a national pinch on ammunition supplies due to heavy military demand has become an administrative headache for upstate New York police departments _ and in some cases reduced firearms training _ officials said it so far has had little affect on how they do their jobs….

However, an order placed in early July arrived last week, said Syracuse police Sgt. Shawn Smith, who added that he is now hearing from other local police agencies there could be delays of 12 to 18 months.

“The delays have been getting worse and worse, and that’s really putting a strain on us. It used to be fairly quick. I’d get my ammunition in a month. The .45 caliber though is getting really behind, sometimes up to six months and getting worse,” Smith said. It’s also producing budgeting headaches for future fiscal years, he said.

The ammo shortages for police agencies in upstate NY are to do with this:

Troops training for and fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are firing more than 1 billion bullets a year, contributing to ammunition shortages hitting police departments nationwide and preventing some officers from training with the weapons they carry on patrol.

An Associated Press review of dozens of police and sheriff’s departments found that many are struggling with delays of as long as a year for both handgun and rifle ammunition. And the shortages are resulting in prices as much as double what departments were paying just a year ago.

“There were warehouses full of it. Now, that isn’t the case,” said Al Aden, police chief in Pierre, S.D.

This is of course not the worst consequence of the Iraq disaster. But it is a reminder of just how subtle and widespread are the effects of this misbegotten enterprise. It is possible to forget about the war for a brief spell, a brief stretch of time — it is even possible to pretend it does not exist. But that’s an illusion. For Americans, the effect of the war is on the whole very much like that of blood slowly, remorselessly seeping in from under a locked door. In small ways and large, it has corrupted everything, and it will be decades before we can even begin to tot up the final bill. And Americans know this. Every newspaper in the country carries the news of a local man or woman killed in the line of duty over there, maybe daily, maybe weekly, maybe monthly… but, inevitably.

So, back to work. This abomination must be ended.

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