Life & Wisdom Quote by Barbara Ehrenreich

"America is addicted to wars of distraction" lands like a diagnosis, not a slogan. Ehrenreich borrows the language of compulsion to reframe militarism as a habit engineered and maintained: something craved, repeated, and defended even when it harms the body politic. "Addicted" does two jobs at once. It implies dependency (we reach for war because we feel we need it) and denial (we insist it is noble, necessary, surgical). The sting is that addiction is not just an elite pathology; it spreads through culture, media, and everyday talk until the rush feels like normalcy.

The phrase "wars of distraction" sharpens the charge. War is recast as attention management: a way to redirect public outrage, launder political failure into patriotic purpose, and offer a clean narrative arc when domestic life is messy. Distraction here isn't mere entertainment; it's governance by spectacle. The subtext is that war becomes a multi-use tool: it rallies voters, fuels budgets, flatters national self-image, and supplies a moral theater where villains are clearer than, say, stagnant wages, hollowed-out public goods, or structural inequality.

Ehrenreich, a writer who made a career out of puncturing comforting stories about class and power, aims at the emotional economy that makes intervention feel like action. The line fits the post-Vietnam, post-9/11 rhythm of American politics: cycles of fear, mobilization, and selective amnesia. It's accusatory, but also bleakly intimate: if it's addiction, we are not just misled. We are complicit in the craving.