Shit! That's the second LJ death I've heard about this evening! One was a lady in her thirties who succumbed to a secondary staph infection after a bout of the flu. And now a soldier in Iraq...where my brother-in-law (raised in Paradise) is now. I am SOOOO not liking this war and the president who went into it without a plan to get out of it.
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. It sucketh bigtime.
I didn't actually know him. He was on insomnia's friends list, and I had seen a couple of his posts. It's always depressing when we start bumping off kids with our collective incompetence.
but, i get very confused when people write things like "thank you for your ultimate sacrifice for our country" and ilk like that.
maximum respect to the dead, dont get me wrong...
im just not so sure- as one replyer put it there- what it is were thankful for in that respect. that another person- one of over a thousand- has died in an unjust and unnecessary war? thats somehow a sacrifice for our country?
i dont get it. how did he sacrifice himself for our country? that question is very hard for me. im not trying to sound glib or argumentative, but i always have trouble with this question...
War, like any other action, requires a narrative to sustain it. Those who commented are telling a story to themselves, the purpose of which is to justify their own convictions. Mike Smith has become a character in that story for each of its tellers. He has been fictionalized and fragmented, because the story is not about him- it is about the tellers of the tales themselves, and their relationship to the world. It is one more way in which truth is the first casualty in a war- or at least in the story I tell about it. Maybe the only fundamental truth in any story is the one implicit in the existence of the story itself: that the human mind cannot tolerate uninterpreted events.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
I'm sorry to hear about your friend. It sucketh bigtime.
no subject
no subject
but, i get very confused when people write things like "thank you for your ultimate sacrifice for our country" and ilk like that.
maximum respect to the dead, dont get me wrong...
im just not so sure- as one replyer put it there- what it is were thankful for in that respect. that another person- one of over a thousand- has died in an unjust and unnecessary war? thats somehow a sacrifice for our country?
i dont get it. how did he sacrifice himself for our country? that question is very hard for me. im not trying to sound glib or argumentative, but i always have trouble with this question...
peace to him, though. for sure.
no subject