Supporting the War, Disagreeing with the War

It's funny how people get hung up on ideas that are not mutually exclusive.

For example, the Iraq War. I think a person can be supportive of American troops while still believing that this particular war was a mistake.

Disagreeing with the reasons for the war does not negate one's support for responsible men and women risking their lives in order to do their jobs well.

Likewise, supporting men and women who show fidelity to their responsibilities does not mean one has to agree with the task with which they have been assigned.

Why has this nation become so simplistic? (Or perhaps it has always been so -- just expressed differently through the decades.)

An adult mind should be able to hold two (or more) disparate thoughts at the same time and live with the tension created by them.

I wonder if the generation gap has contributed. Gen X did not experience the demeaning close of Vietnam (or at least grasp it fully), where soldiers wounded and killed serving their country were reviled and abused upon their return home. Activist Baby Boomers [wrongfully] directed their anti-war furor against people who were only serving their country [as expressed through the will of politicians -- whether or not it was correct], rather than at the thing they actually hated.

That whole experience left a bitter taste in many people's mouths, and as far as I can tell, it seems to be the older generation that has trouble merging patriotism with moral dissent -- that seems to equate criticism of current policy with some sort of infantile rebellion.

It's one of the things that makes it difficult to unify this country. Many people seem happy with blue and red and never the twain shall meet.

Who is Paul's Old Man?

When people think about the Old Man (as opposed to the New Creation) in Paul's letters in the New Testament, they've been trained to picture a despicable creature, one who still has dirt on his face and holes in his clothes, who hasn't shaved, who goes about indulging in every selfish and pig-headed desire, who is little more than an animal dressed up in human clothing.

But what if the Old Man inside me doesn't look like that at all? Does not even Lucifer come disguised as an angel of light?

...Food for thought...

A More Enduring Legacy

Speaker Dennis Hastert has taken some flak over suggesting that perhaps it’s not worth the cost to rebuild New Orleans. Aside from the obvious hazards of its location, the price would be exorbitant: One projection to rebuild the city runs $20-100 billion.

I don’t know whether New Orleans can be rebuilt.

I don’t know whether it’s worth it, pragmatically speaking, to have New Orleans rebuilt.

I don’t know whether the city can be better protected than it had been in the past.

But I do know one thing. I know that rebuilding New Orleans would be a much more vibrant, more visionary, more vital legacy for Bush than the Iraq War, which cost at least $120 billion if not more and endangered if not destroyed many lives.

All that money, spent on firepower to supposedly help another country, while we now have people here who desperately need government intervention and have little to show at the moment.

A president who determines to put his money where his mouth is, a (this sounds banal) white wealthy president rebuilding a city mostly populated by the black poor, a city that otherwise will just be eerie ruins sitting in a bog and lost eventually to history.

A city that can be built from scratch in light of current economical and racial relations, a city that has a chance to be unified from the start instead of stuck with decades of poor planning and social slump.

I can’t imagine a more enduring legacy, or something that would shine in the hearts of democrats and republicans alike as an example of the affirmation of life, equality, and unity that the president has long preached but not really delivered on.

What is George W Bush made of? His response to New Orleans will reveal a great deal.

Katrina Reflections #5 (Bittersweet)

Labor Day weekend was gorgeous, three days of comfortable sun, cotton-ball clouds, and blue sky. I couldn’t imagine a better day, one that wasn’t too hot or cold, one that wasn’t too dry or wet. The sunsets were spectacular, the remains of the dying day spilling molten gold across the grass.

The beauty only made New Orleans look even worse, almost horrific, brutal, savage. How can such beauty coexist alongside such tragedy?

Somewhere a baby is born; elsewhere, one dies. Here someone regains his health after a terrible bout with cancer; elsewhere a woman struggles for breath from pneumonia, then stops. A priceless work of art is painted; another burns in a fire.

One nation grapples with poverty and civil unrest; another lives in the lap of luxury, sipping cappuccinos and watching the latest cinematic release on their home theaters, complaining about the inconvenience of the trailer inserts.

How does one reconcile such juxtaposition of beauty and death? The world is bipolar; nature is a passive-aggressive momentarily on the rampage before once again it curls comfortably by the fire and begins to purr.

The world seems so pitiless sometimes – not just the bully that tramples us into the dirt and steals our lunch money but then turns right around and buys a meal for the poor kid on the street. We are left only with WTH gaping jaw s and the sinking feeling that we can never be sure whether today we will be the victim of blind fury or the recipient of unimagined beauty.

And what of God? If nature is an extension of him, what does this say? Or is it merely a creation that has, for the moment, simply lost its mind?

The dichotomy is hard to reconcile, almost makes me want to weep. Knowledge of the bad almost makes it hard to enjoy the good, yet somehow I am supposed to. And I would not demand that someone else be miserable simply because I am suffering some tragedy. Somehow the human spirit, what it means to be created in God’s image, is supposed to harbor both realities in its heart at once -- a life informed both by pleasure and pain, beauty and revulsion, peace and strife.