This is the text of an email from my sister, mother of 4, and high school teacher in West Chester, PA:
The latest news from Iraq with the beheading of a US citizen has hit particularly hard here, as the young man was a '96 graduate of Henderson High School (where some of her kids go) and his father recently retired from teaching at West Chester East–the other high school in our district. The parents live on Estate Drive, in the same neighborhood as that of some of her kids’ friends. While in high school, Nick Berg worked summers in the West Chester summer science program which her kids attended for a couple summers–perhaps,addressing oldest child, you remember “Bergology” which was what they called the part of the program he directed.
Although I don’t know the family, somehow having so many connections with them makes the brutality even more unbearable than it would otherwise be. daughter came home and said the news media were at her school today, so perhaps you all knew this was local to us.
My seniors are doing a short story unit, and, as a review, today I had given them a packet of poems that I’d chosen for their connections to the stories–their goal was to seek out the connections. One of the poems was about someone executed for the color of his hair; it’s by A.E. Housman and is fairly tongue-in-cheek in tone. One of the students remarked that the poem was “stupid” because no one would be executed for the color of his hair. I responded, today of all days you should realize that people are executed for no better reason.
As if I needed anything, this further cements my view that we have entered into a dark political quagmire from which we will never truly recover. Certainly, the Iraquis have given us continued indications that they don’t want us there. Is it naivity or narcissism that suggests to us that we can create a democracy modeled on our own in a country where the people are fundamentally ideologically different than we are? Where, no matter what we do, we will still be infidels with point values on our heads?
I have several students entering the military at the end of the school year, and there is not one I would sacrifice to the cause. The only benefit to volunteers is it keeps down the rumblings in Congress about reinstating the draft–imagine how that news over the last couple weeks felt to the mother of 19 & 17-year-old sons and the teacher of hundreds more in that age group.
Pray for peace.
I can understand the grief in the letter and the worry of a teacher whose kids may well soon be involved. Hopefully it will end as soon as possible with as little more horror on both sides as is possible.
Emm, believe me, it has been felt well outside of your community. Let us hope that this young mad did not die without something possitive happening. Quite possibly the rest of the world will see this as a more grievious act than the error’s committed by our own military personel and react accordingly.
My first response to Rando’s post was similar to Chuck’s - that it was somewhat cruel and inappropriate, but as I thought about it, I decided that the intent was not to escalate an arguement, but to offer a way to find clarification.
I know that I learned a whole lot more of the truth of previous wars from actually talking with the people who were there, ‘in the trenches’, so to speak. I helped me understand a lot.
I think his advice is good… though I certainly see how it could be interpreted otherwise…
Rando’s post did not offend me. It would be silly to comment on the human cost of war and think someone else wouldn’t present an additional facet. Without question, those who have been there can provide valuable insight. But I also want to thank Chuck, because I didn’t want to start another political thread—those who enjoy that debate have somewhere else to find it. It is just nearly impossible for me to disentangle the emotional impact of war from the clinical debate on the rightness or wrongness of it.
This area’s been lucky so far. Our local Guard unit came home physically if not emotionally unscathed. And so far, the local media is showing enough class to let them alone to deal with it as they find necessary.
I really feel for the Berg family, as for countless others whose grief is so often compounded by the legal but sometimes heartless pressures of the press microphones and cameras.
I have an 18yr old son and I worry that he’ll get sucked into this madness. My overall reaction to this whole ordeal is sadness. It seems chaos and barbarism swirl around areas for a time and anyone in the vicinity is vulnerable to getting sucked up in it, whether innocently or intentionally. I’m unable to see things in the good guy versus bad guy style of the movies. It’s hard to predict what the consequences will be of an action regardless of motivation. I don’t know if I’ll ever know what our motivations really were in going to Iraq. I feel sad for everyone involved. I hear many Iraqi’s are despairing of the violence. And the money spent to do this that could be spent on something helpful. I’m horrified for that young man and his family, for all of us who heard what was done to him, for the Iraqis who share our horror, for the prison atrocities, for the whole damned madness. There are no superheroes or aliens that are going to rescue us from ourselves. I wonder if we’ll ever figure out a better way.
Wait until the recent news out of Sudan becomes more publicized. It only gets worse.
Tony
