we owe them more than what they're getting. we owe our vietnam vets more than they got and are getting as well. i am amazed people still enlist after they see the treatment we apply to some who have come back broken and bentcomment posted September 12, 2005 (web only)
A War Over Meaning
Robert Jay Lifton & Greg Mitchell
Americans are struggling to come to terms with the devastation of Hurricane Katrina and with deaths that may ultimately number in the thousands. It is important that this near-apocalyptic disaster not eclipse the still-unfolding disaster of the war in Iraq, upon which Katrina may have an unforeseen influence.
At the heart of the matter is what we owe the dead. President Bush, referring recently to Americans killed in Iraq, said that "we owe them something" and must "finish the task that they gave their lives for." Finding himself in the middle of a national debate over the meaning we give to our war dead, he clings to the traditional response--that our soldiers must not have died in vain, and that their deaths represent noble sacrifices on behalf of eternal principles. Now taking hold, however, is an alternative, critical meaning: that these deaths can be rendered significant only by acknowledging the futility of the war itself.
Americans are grappling with these contradictory meanings. But the war's terrible toll (nearly 2,000 US soldiers killed as of this writing, and Iraqi deaths estimated at more than 20,000), together with the increasing recognition that the war is unwinnable, are strengthening the alternative meaning.................
|
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment