We Get There By Walking

Doing my best to find my way.

Canyon of Heroes

Yesterday New York City hosted a parade for the New York Giants football team down the Canyon of Heroes in lower Manhattan.  Thousands of people gathered to cheer the winners of the football’s Super Bowl.  But, lingering in the background, is a debate about whether or not New York City should host a similar parade for the returning veterans of the Iraq War.  A veterans group is pushing for it.  Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said that the Defense Department has asked that he wait until the war in Afghanistan is over as well.

I have to admit to mixed feelings about it all.
On one hand we have made sports a religion and we worship its victors.
And, we speak about games being battles and plays being “fought out in the trenches.” Maybe we all need to reread All Quiet on the Western Front to remember what we are really speaking about when we use those words.

On the other hand, I wonder about a parade for our returning armed forces.
Please, don’t get me wrong.
We certainly should honor their service and their sacrifice.
We certainly should recognize the sacrifice of their families.
We certainly should do all we can to help them reintegrate into the life of the community with jobs and mental health support and medical care when needed.
But, I can’t help feeling we are being a bit disingenuous about it all.
Much has been made about thanking our service men and women, and they deserve our thanks, but those who serve are coming from a smaller and smaller segment of our population.  The community in which I live doesn’t have 50% of its high school graduates entering the armed forces.  My children are not subject to call ups and to repeated deployments.  To tell you the truth, I am not sure what to make of it all.  Are we thanking them for doing something that, if we really believe in the war being fought, all of us should have a greater stake in, as well?

And, while I want to honor and to respect those who have served, I do not want to glorify war.  We should be abhorred by it.  The casualties and the destruction should make us sick to our stomach.  The suffering of both the combatants and the innocent civilians should bring tears to our eyes.
If it doesn’t…
If war remains sanitized…
It will continue to be far too easy to go to war again.

Collateral Damage

I got home late last night, but just in time to see the opening couple of minutes of the new NBC’s news program Rock Center. With the Iraq War coming to an “end” after nine years, the program began by recounting the cost of the war.  Cost-in terms of dollars, American lives lost, and the number of soldiers wounded. But not a word about the “collateral damage” caused by the war.  Collateral damage in terms of the number of Iraqi citizens killed or wounded which estimates put, at least, in the tens of thousands if not more, and the amount of destruction done to Iraqi homes and businesses and infrastructure. Maybe something was said later in the program which I missed, but nothing was said in those first few minutes.

All that is very troubling to me for two reasons.
The first is that, as a nation, we have never been willing to really talk about the human cost of the war.  We have been purposefully shielded from those images and that heartbreak in an effort to make the war more palatable to the American public. And, the second reason is that the very real human suffering, when it has been talked about, has always been referred to as collateral damage.  Something like “Opps.  My bad.” and never about children being killed or mothers losing a leg or a family’s home being destroyed.

Until we are honest…
And, until we demand a level of honesty from our elected officials about the true cost of war, war will continue to be far too easy.

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Paul Alcorn

Several things I believe:

The most critical religious question of our day is how we will answer the question "Who is my neighbor?"

That which we know and name as God is more about the connections between us than something above us.

And this, from the poet Maya Angelou...
"Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better."