Hi Arlo, Thank you for writing. It is so hard for me to make sense out of war. If I think about it too much I get crazy. I don't understand men. One kind of tyranny traded for another kind of tyranny. All rationalized into a neat little package.
Collateral damage has a mother too. Marsha At 10:32 AM 10/3/2007, you wrote: >Hi Marsha, > >Someone once told me, "a soldier is not a hero because of what he >does, he is a hero because of what he risks". > >I said this to a Marine friend of mine, and he looked at me really >seriously and said "you'd be surprised how many people, civilians and >soldiers, don't understand that". > >In a song called Red Army Blues (by The Waterboys) the lyrics open with... > >When I left my home and my family >my mother said to me >Son, it's not how many Germans you kill that counts >It's how many people you set free. > >When we look closely, many times, at the unbridled patriotic >masturbation of the modern political dialogue, we can see this subtle >yet profound misunderstanding. And as such we are moving back to the >pre-WWI idea of "war". This is, as is seen in the following Pirsig >quote, simply systemic of the overall retreat to Victorianism Pirsig >talks about later. > >"The Victorian social system and the Victorian morality that led into >World War I had portrayed war as an adventurous conflict between >noble individuals engaged in the idealistic service of their country: >a kind of extended knighthood. Victorians loved exquisitely painted >heroic battle scenes in their drawing rooms, with dashing cavalrymen >riding toward the enemy with sabers drawn, or a horse returning >riderless with the title, "Bad News." Death was acknowledged by an >occasional soldier in the arms of his comrades looking palely toward heaven. > >World War I wasn't like that. The Gatling gun removed the nobility, >the heroism. The Victorian painters had never shown a battlefield of >mud and shell holes and barbed wire and half a million rotting >corpses-some staring toward heaven, some staring into the mud, some >without faces to stare in any direction. That many had been murdered >in one battle alone." (LILA) > >I am convinced the modern war will not end until a draft is instated, >and all exceptions to it abolished. Too few are sacrificing too much >for too little. And we are maintaining that disequilibrium by the >deceitful rhetoric of political ideologues and politicians. > > >Arlo > > > > >At 04:32 AM 10/3/2007, you wrote: > > >Greetings, > > > >I think Ken Burn's documentary should be followed by a 12-hour > >documentary of sobbing mothers. Rational, my left foot!!! What > >fathers might call rational, mothers may call psychotic. Justify it > >as you might, rationality is a myth. > > > >Marsha > >Moq_Discuss mailing list >Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. >http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org >Archives: >http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ >http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
