War

Yesterday I finally finished watching The Hurt Locker, a powerfully affecting movie about the war in Iraq. It wasn't easy to watch, but it felt important to me to see it so that I don't manage to distance myself entirely from the experience of our soldiers. I don't have a TV, I don't watch the news, and I tend to limit my newspaper reading to the closer-to-home stories in The New York Times. It sort of needs to be that way for me so that all my energy to affect positive change in this world doesn't get sucked into the vortex of all the bad things that mankind has to endure.

The Hurt Locker was very effective in many ways, but most of all in revealing the humanity on both sides, which only served to underscore the senselessness of all the lives lost.

This song, which I remember hearing as a very little girl, captures that same senselessness:

War, it ain't nothing but a heartbreaker

War, it's got one friend

That's the undertaker

Ooooh, war, has shattered

Many a young man's dreams

Made him disabled, bitter and mean

Life is much too short and precious

To spend fighting wars these days

War can't give life

It can only take it away

Ooooh, war, huh

Good God y'all

What is it good for

Absolutely nothing

Say it again

I couldn't agree more, but I'm a peace-loving intellectual whose need to flirt with danger can be satisfied by doing a headstand in the middle of the room or swimming in an ocean where it is possible to encounter a shark. There are those among us whose need to flirt with danger is in an entirely different category, and the movie leaves us with the somewhat unsettling proposition that war may be good for more people than just undertakers. And I guess that's a good thing, at least as long as we insist on fighting them. Or maybe that's part of the reason we insist on fighting them? I don't know. It just seems like we could be using our valuable resources -- human and monetary -- for more life-affirming purposes. You know, like education.