Politics & Power Quote by Pete Hamill

Hamill’s line lands like a weary punchline delivered without the comfort of a joke. “It’s odd being an American now” opens with mild bewilderment, the kind that sounds almost neighborly, then tightens into an indictment: the national self-image and the national behavior no longer match. He’s not arguing that Americans are uniquely violent; he’s pointing out the civic dissonance of a country that insists on its everyday decency while repeatedly arriving at war as if it were bad weather.

The phrase “Most of us are peaceful” is doing double duty. It’s a defense of ordinary people and a quiet rebuke of the structures that act in their name. Hamill’s journalism always understood that policy is experienced as atmosphere: war becomes background noise, normalized by distance, professionalization, and the way media cycles teach audiences to move on. His “here we are again” is the rhythm of recurrence, a nation sleepwalking back into the same room.

The clincher is the bookkeeping: “fifth major war of this century.” Counting is a moral act here, stripping away the euphemisms and bespoke rationales that let each conflict present itself as exceptional. It’s also a refusal of amnesia. Hamill is writing from the post-9/11 era when war felt both omnipresent and abstracted, fought by a volunteer force, financed on credit, narrated in bursts. The subtext: if most people are peaceful, why does peace keep losing the vote to history’s machinery?