On being anti-war

On the radio this morning, they were discussing at length a poll on how people feel about Canadian troops being in Afghanistan.

I listened as I bustled about my morning routine and mulled things over, and I kept coming back to one thought:

In general, being anti-war is surprisingly unpopular. I hold a lot of unpopular and/or uncommon opinions, and I think of all the opinions I hold, my pacifism is the one I get the most shit for. It sounds strange, but based on my experiences with these things, if you stick me in a randomly-selected group of people I'm more likely to offend by saying "What if they had a war and nobody came?" than by anything else it might occur to me to say. I've also noticed that whenever someone expresses general or specific anti-war sentiments in public, they seem to qualify them more than with most other statements, like people need more reassurance that this doesn't mean the speaker wants your brother in the military to die or for the world to be dominated by nazis or something. Look at the uproar surrounding white poppies - apparently it's controversial to express pacifist sentiments for Remembrance Day of all things!

So with all this in mind, I keep finding myself wondering how honestly people answered this poll. Maybe they did answer honestly - I'd assume that pollsters aren't in the habit of dissing pollees opinions. Or maybe they answered less anti-war than they feel, out of the habit of toning down their anti-war sentiments. Or maybe they were more anti-war than usual, to compensate for the fact that they usually have to tone things down in public (although I don't know if people would think of this on their feet while answering a poll.)

It doesn't usually occur to me so strongly that a poll may be inaccurate, but in this case it really struck me.