My comments regarding the New York Times story…

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/opinion/going-home-again.html

The story about Rod’s sister is certainly a painful tragedy. Emmanuel Levinas, a French philosopher, was a concentration camp survivor. He thought of the other as an absolute singularity and the death of the other as an unrecoverable loss. I am a Dreher also from Louisiana and have experienced this pain with the long painful loss of two older brothers. My brothers were lost in the Vietnam War. They both returned but left their young spirits in the jungle. They suffered intensely and were never the same after they returned. One recently died. He told me he woke up many nights with the Vietnamese women and children he had to shoot from his helicopter standing around his bed even after he was fully awake. The enemy shot at their helicopters with the women and children surrounding them. The other has been almost totally a hermit since he returned. Since Vietnam, he has never been ‘normal’ in any since of the word. While they were not counted as part of the body bag count they and our family’s life was never the same after they returned from Vietnam. Rod’s sister tragically died from cancer. Cancer strikes the victims loved ones as well but as helplessness. We each die inside when our loved one dies and cancer only reminds us of our absolute finitude and vulnerability. War is a human act. War can be prevented in many cases. When our loved ones are victims of war we feel pain and helplessness but we also feel anger. When our politicians start wars that are clearly not a matter of absolute and imminent necessity for survival or by mistake, this error may be abstract to most Americans but to those of us that directly experienced the resulting pain, we are angered by the glibness of such abstractions and everyone that made such tragedies possible from voters to political decision makers. Rod and I are on opposite sides of the political spectrum but pain is universal for mortals. We will carry our tragic losses every day for the rest of our lives but PLEASE folks do not think of war as one political issue among others, it is horrible tragedy that we can prevent – If you are grateful to our veterans please take our pain to the voting booth.