Johnny Got His Gun Principles Quotes

"Making the world safe for democracy" is a pretty huge task, but it is actually one of the reasons Woodrow Wilson gave when the U.S. entered World War I. The question is, what does such a monumental task have to do with good ol' Joe? For that matter, what (Joe might ask) does it have to do with World War I?

"Liberty" has been a rallying cry for many countries over the past 300 years, but as Joe points out, it's become so entrenched that people don't really stop to think about what exactly it means in a given situation. It's not clear whether the questions Joe is asking in this passage are rhetorical (meaning they can't be answered), or whether he expects them to have hard, definitive answers.

Liberty is what you might call an abstract concept: it's not something you can ever physically point to or grasp; it's just an idea. But to Joe, that indicates that it's even weaker than something as mundane as a table, which is at least solid. It isn't necessarily that Joe wants liberty to be a simple, solid thing you can point to; but if people are going to fight and die for it, it should be something (he thinks) that at least be logically explained and applied to a specific situation.