[MD] War Stories

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Marsha]
Collateral damage has a mother too.

[Arlo]
Absolutely. And it is this that gets lost under the weight of the 
Noble Knight Myth, where the only possible choices are broken into 
two absolute poles. "Our side", which epitomizes the noble and just 
and Good, and "their side", which contains naught but evil, vile, 
subhuman creatures. We dehumanize the enemy to assuage any guilt we 
may feel, and in doing so create the perfect enemy.

And all this comes back to the idea that we must create unassailable 
hierarchies of value, whereupon "we" sit unchallenged at the zenith, 
using the inferior "others" only as best serve our needs. It is not 
simply xenophobia, a fear of the other, but an outright lack of all 
empathy relating to the human condition as experienced by anyone 
outside our national and cultural superiority.

"A plane crashed in Brazil this morning killing 235 people... there 
were no Americans on board. In other news..." (Chevy Chase, SNL)

While some trumpet this as they way they are and ought to be, I see 
it as a sad tragedy that will ensure the continued stalemate of 
humanity's evolution.




At 12:05 PM 10/3/2007, you wrote:

>Hi Arlo,
>
>Thank you for writing.  It is so hard for me to make sense out of
>war.  If I think about it too much I get crazy.  I don't understand
>men.  One kind of tyranny traded for another kind of tyranny.  All
>rationalized into a neat little package.
>
>Collateral damage has a mother too.
>
>Marsha