from the Annals of “Nothing Ever Goes As Planned”

i had three posts in the works for the March 19 Blogswarm, and as it happened, i neglected to have them saved in the Wordpress database. thanks to some beta software on this computer, when i hybernated the computer because three realtors were bringing prospective buyers through our house yesterday (one of whom didn’t call first like he’s supposed to, no less), the system didn’t wake up. the resulting hard reboot lost me a bout two hours of blog-work. go figure. i ALWAYS save drafts, or draft in a text editor. but not yesterday (or night before last, for that matter). i think this whole selling-the-house-and-preparing-to-move shin-dig has me pretty scattered. never a dull freakin’ moment, anyway.

i feel compelled, though, to follow up with some notes on the day, because as inferred yesterday, the current Iraq war hits a bit close to home for me as a Gulf War veteran. not that i think my personal considerations on it are any more important or dynamic than those who have served or are serving in the current war, but that i had given my word to support the blogswarm endeavor, and failed to adequately do so. the chagrin-meter leans heavily to the right.

so naturally, when the realtors were done traipsing through the house and not giving us an offer immediately, and when the children were finally tucked into bed, and after i’d finished up some client work, i at least managed to get out and do some reading. one of the things that quickly struck me was that {insert almost any other blogger’s online identity or blog name here} writes better than me, and i’m not just talking about the presumably-appropriate use of capital letters. i still had a lot of what i’d written in my head, and i could have theoretically replicated my previous efforts, but after an hour or so of reading, i realized how redundant that would have been. great minds think alike after all, although putting myself in their company is probably a bit dishonest. so instead, on the off-chance that you might have missed some of these fine posts, allow me to serve you by including a brief synposis and link to their thoughts, witticisms and insights.

To start with, One Pissed Off Veteran apparently communicated my own feelings rather elegantly and succinctly:

I don’t much feel like being funny today. I feel like being pissed off.

VJack over at Atheist Revolution reminds us that it’s not just our reckless government that is at fault for this war. indeed. i couln’t have said this better myself, and this was one of the points i had been sure to make in my own now-lost drafts. ours is a culture of enablement, to our collective political detriment, and at the cost of the lives of our children and loved ones.

And then something even worse happened, something that reflects just how dire this situation was becoming. The American people signed on to the war too. Through our apathy and inaction, we gave this administration and a failed Congress exactly what they most wanted. Instead of demanding an end to the war and impeachment of those who lied us into it, we folded. Instead of pressuring the Democratic majority we had just elected to uphold their promises to represent the will of the people, we gave up. After all, the war has had little impact on our daily lives, and say, that Britney Spears sure seems interesting. In greater numbers, we turned off the news and turned on American Idol. We disengaged from the process, telling ourselves that we had tried and done what we could.

in his piece titled Sacrificing for the War, Tangled up in Blue Guy briefly recites the general timeline for the war and reminds us of another nuance on the problem of this war:

Our political candidates for president are not hearing the people of the United States who want to end this folly NOW. We must leave responsibly or there will be a bloodbath. There is a bloodbath going on now. Christopher Hitchens says that if we leave now there will be a new wholesale slaughter that will make the genocides of Rwanda look like a mild matter. John McCain says we will only leave when we have peace, even if it takes 100 years. Hillary Clinton looks to a “responsible” pull out, as does Obama. I don’t even know what that means, or what “victory” looks like.

my blog-friend, FranIAm has an excellent post titled March 19 - The Ugly Anniversary. at the beginning of it, she provides us with a timely quote from Dwight D. Eisenhower.

I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it.
-Dwight D. Eisenhower

if only it worked that way today, General. if only.

lastly, for the purposes of this post, FranIAm led me to a thoughtful post by a Vietnam veteran, entitled Invasion and Occupation. in this post, johnhieb at here still running reminds us of the plight of the veterans of this war.

Some of us not so important people demonstrated, of course. We argued the case was flimsy, and that war wasn’t the only, or even a good option. But, within a couple of months, Captain Codpiece’s media consultants declared “Mission Accomplished!”. But nobody came home yet. And now nearly four thousand will have come home in secret, in aluminum tubes at midnight. And tens of thousands will drool in powered wheelchairs while their mothers adjust to a life of caregiver. And hundreds of thousands will fight to get what their government promised them, and be denied, until they give up, or kill themselves in one way or another: unnoticed again.

all in all, it was a depressing read last night, but depressing only in the sense of recognizing from these (and many other) different perspectives on what has been done, what is being done, and who all it effects, that our collective complicity is a major driving factor. this war is a tragedy that desperately needs to end. we can’t undo what’s been done, but we can change the direction we’re going. talk to your Senators and Representatives, and communicate this need to your favorite candidate. repeatedly, if necessary. and often!

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