Syndicated columnist Marc Munroe Dion: Gimme a cigarette. Gimme a stamp

Ukraine is fighting for its life, and the United States is sending weapons, and the price of gasoline is up.

Which of the above statements is the most important?

If you said the price of gas, then congratulations! You're as right as Glenn Beck and the late Rush Limbaugh on a three-day pill bender during an NRA convention.

Not being able to gas up your classic Corvette for a reasonable price is at least as important as the bodies of headless children in the streets of Kyiv. Besides, if you don't care about dead children in Texas, why would you care about dead children in Ukraine?

The important thing is you get to have a classic Corvette, and you get to have an AR-15. Shared sacrifice is for communists.

America is, after all, a nation of suckers. When France got conquered by the Nazis, dumb old toothpick-chewing America poured out its blood by the bucketful, liberating those snobbish Frenchmen. At the same time, we were fighting the Japanese, who had gone on a little conquest binge of their own.

World War II was all-inclusive. Your sons and your husband and every other male member of your family got drafted if they were of a proper age.

But not to worry, if you were too old or too young to fight, or you were female, there was still plenty you could do right there at home.

It was called "rationing." Because the troops overseas needed guns, clothes, bullets and cigarettes, those things were rationed in America, along with a lot of other things.

I mention cigarettes because nearly everyone smoked in 1942, and the average person needed cigarettes the way people need heroin now.

The government issued "ration books" full of "ration stamps," and how many stamps you had determined how much gasoline or meat you could buy

Imagine trying that today.

We wage wars all the time. Iraq. Afghanistan.

But no matter where our troops are defending our freedom, you never, ever have to go without anything here at home. No matter how hard the Taliban is fighting back, you can buy cigarettes and craft beer, motorcycles, bullets and steak. You can buy as much of that stuff as you can afford, too. No stamps. No pesky government interference. We've bankrupted the nation fighting endless wars, and not once has anyone had to skip taco night because he didn't have any more meat ration stamps.

We want military might, and we want taco night, and by God, we will not be cheated of either one. I'm an American, and the 15 pounds of blubber hanging over my belt is my flag.

We will not comply. We will not give up anything in the cause of freedom.

Our Greatest Generation ancestors complied. They got on the troopship, and they stormed the beach, and the first ones on the beach went down like a row of ducks. Back home, they let their government tell them how many tires they could buy in a year, how much gasoline they could buy, how much meat they could eat and how any cigarettes they could smoke. Obviously, they were sheep.

Could America do that today?

If you told Americans they could free all of Ukraine just by giving up taco night for a year, you'd be able to hear us whining and crying in outer space.

We're not the Greatest Generation.

If Vladimir Putin offered to sell the United States oil at an 80% discount for the next five years provided we stop shipping weapons to Ukraine, we'd take the deal, and the price of gasoline would fall to $2 a gallon, and freedom would be saved.

Let's try to make that deal. Heck, they're just Ukrainians, and I got my eye on a classic Corvette.

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