The Name of Death

 

The Nine-Eleven Commemoration and the issues arising about the Bush and Kerry military records have raised an important question of perspective. Let me throw in the miasma of Iraq, because the blood there seems to be flowing ever faster. I’m talking about the dead, and I raise this matter gently, for fear that I will outrage some people who don’t take the time to step back from their instinctive revulsion and look at the larger picture.

The point I seek to make is that we tend to confuse victims and heroes. The 3,000 people who died in the terrorist attacks got on planes or went to work in normal fashion and were brutally murdered, but they weren’t heroes, as they were subsequently portrayed, they were victims. They weren’t even targeted, they were merely fodder for the terrorists.

I hasten to add that that doesn’t make their deaths less tragic. Indeed, maybe they were more so for their innocence.

Similarly, our men and women who served in Iraq, especially those who have come home in coffins, or missing arms or legs or faces, have been called heroes and in truth, many of them were heroic. But many of them, also, were simply victims, people attacked because they wore uniforms of the United States of America. Their loss means everything to their family and friends, as it should, but to their nation, they are numbers, called heroes because they wore the uniform.

In truth, they are all, heroic or not, victims...victims of an obscene, anachronistic idea that body count justifies policy...when they are really just young lives snuffed out by vitiated politicians.

On November second, we will choose to lead us, either John Kerry, a true hero in Vietnam who returned home to say that war was wrong, or George Bush, who avoided Vietnam, a conflict he enthusiastically supported.

Will we choose to be victims or heroes?

And that’s SetonnoteS...I’m Tony Seton.

 

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