Part Two (Forum and Email Responses)

This entire topic reminds me of one class where the professor told a story about a man he met on the bus a few years prior.

The man had lost his son the previous year to cancer and after long battles and stays in the hospital, his son's body just gave out. He said his boy had lots of mental fight, but sometimes the body just can't support it. When he died, he and his wife moved to a new house, unable to sleep in the same place. They felt haunted by their own grief. Eventually the marriage ended, and the man was now moving on to a new city where he had some old college friends. He showed my professor a picture, and he literally gasped in horror at the sight of a man that looked at least thirty years younger than the man he met on the bus. The child, a ten year old boy, was using braces to walk and had a big smile on his face. I raised my hand and asked if he remains in contact with him, and my prof said sadly no. He did offer the man prayer which he politely refused, saying that he felt abandoned by God. 'Teach said he understood and moved on, but he remembers the last thing the guy said before they went their separate ways, "I wish I could ask God why."

George Bush didn't kill her child. Neither did God, really. Someone, somewhere gave an order to do so. But the fact remains that Bush sent lots of other people's children somewhere to fight a war that he has no intention of personally sacrificing for. At no point will Bush EVER send his own children, because I know that he believes that they are the most important thing in his life and that losing them would certainly destroy him and his wife. But he also wants to see them grow and marry and have kids of their own. And that is certainly more important than whatever he thinks he's fighting for over there, because if he really thought it was that important he'd send them. So a mom, who has lost her child, changed her mind about how she felt while meeting the man she thought would answer her concerns. Maybe she did some reading. Maybe in her search for answers she read commentary from different political figures, conservative and liberal, who think that the decisions made were dangerous. Or maybe she just thought about it while she wasn't so broken up about her child and decided to take action while she felt composed enough to respond but still sad enough to cry.

In the Revolutionary War, there are lots of stories of children fighting alongside fathers and brothers arming siblings for battle. Kids lied about their age so they could be conscripted. It was a war of passionate belief, and while it was also a war that had plenty of people who disagreed with its fundamental tenets and did prove to be controversial for its time, there was a tenor of singularity present that allowed for people to understand its motives and desires as ones that were essential to freedom.

This war, however, is clearly about corporate division, profit margins, and basically just doing favors for friends and family of those in power. The reasons have been baseless and false, the preparations hasty and clouded with denial of informational access, and the overall justification patriarchal and divisive. People may not agree about whether we should stay or go, but the facts clearly point to falsehood when it comes to whether or not this war was righteous or legal.

Other moms have come out in favor of the war even after their children died or were wounded. But a lot of them aren't, and while I don't think the opinions of those moms who do come out are invalid I do think that despite their opinion of the war they'd rather have a live son and no war than a dead one. That, my friend, is what aligns those parents together and is why a conservative man, who voted for Bush, volunteered his own space for protestors to sleep. He might enjoy the press, but as a veteran I'm sure he knew that when he went home, his family was happy to see him. And that's worth 1000 Iraqs, dude.