Preoccupied With War
by
Dick Prosapio
© 2002
Is there anything else to write about except the
war? As much as I might like to believe there is, I really can't get
myself to discover it. A friend of mine believes that there is a kind
of "death star" comet headed our way, it'll get here in April or May
he thinks, and it will totally disrupt the planet, though probably not
destroy it.
I don't believe it for a minute, but who knows? If
he's right then what's to worry about? If he's not, then we can keep
right on worrying about everything else.
What a choice.
With the dogs of war on the loose and all the other
dark metaphors and potential realities available for speculation, is
there really any space left in our consciousness for anything else to
be important? "March Madness" has taken on a whole different set of
meanings and who really cares who wins a basketball tournament
except as a side show?
I wish my heart were into writing about the fact
that the meadowlarks are beginning to make their way towards our
altitude. They are hanging out at about 6000' right now and will be
showing up here at our 7000' hilltop in a couple of weeks. And I
spotted two mockingbirds just thirteen miles away from our place last
week. The real signs of spring are moving northward here in New
Mexico.
And then there's the war. People complained that
there wasn't enough coverage of the Gulf War in the '91. We were being
kept in the dark they said. Now they're complaining that we are being
overwhelmed by information. Reporters who were put in with the troops,
"embedded", are now being criticized as being "in-bed" with the
military because they don't show us pictures of our soldiers corpses.
I wonder how well the coverage is being reviewed on the Iraqi side?
It seems that as much insanity as is produced by a
war on the battlefield has as its mirror image, an aimless kind of
craziness on the home front. I can tell you this much from my own
experience; nobody in the U.S. wanted to get into World War ll either.
We were dragged kicking and screaming into that one until Pearl
Harbor. Nobody believed Hitler was a threat to the World, at least not
to our world even after he invaded Poland and Czechoslovakia. Nobody
believed he was killing Jews, and even as the war unfolded, nobody
believed he could outgun us. At the end, he had jets and we didn't. He
had guided missiles, and we didn't. He almost had an atomic bomb and
certainly would have used it. The only reason he didn't have it was a
misjudgment on his part about where to put his priorities.
Is Saddam Hitler? It's a close call. Too close, I
think, to gamble that he is not. If you were the leader of this
country still staggering about after the World Trade Center disaster,
would you want to risk making a mistake about that? That's a lot more
threatening than a fanaticized collision with a comet I think.
Dick Prosapio ©2003, All Rights
Reserved
