IN a few days, as you may have heard, Barack Obama and Mitt Romney will go head-to-head in their first presidential debate. What I most want from it isn’t fireworks, though I’m as big a fan of political theater as the next hack. It’s a word, one that has gone sadly out of vogue over recent decades and been mostly absent from this campaign.

Sacrifice.

And I’m not holding my breath.

Romney, in his convention speech, never uttered it, and Obama, in his, said those three syllables just once, in a telling context. He thanked servicemen and -women who were fighting or had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan for what they’d risked and endured, a sacrifice limited to them and their families and not shared by the rest of us, who enjoyed tax cuts even as the wars’ costs drove the federal debt ever higher.

It’s odd. We revere the Americans who lived through World War II and call them the “greatest generation” precisely because of the sacrifices they made. But we seem more than content to let that brand of greatness pass us by.

Dwight D. Eisenhower, at the end of his presidency, warned Americans about “plundering, for our own ease and convenience, the precious resources of tomorrow.”