At The Beach

Today on the local NPR station I heard an author being interviewed about his latest novel. Apparently the story is an indictment of war packaged as a replay of the Illiad with a – perhaps – immortal – hero named Hector, who is a janitor at a munitions plant. I was just thanking my good fortune that I was riding on my Rocky Mountain hybrid bike on a spinner and could allow the exertion to take me elsewhere. Just before going completely elsewhere, however, something the author said seeped into my fleeing conscious: “you read about explosions every day - they're just numbers..”; this was in the context of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.


I had to react:


Really not.


I think all of us, especially those of us who will become or previously became embroiled at one time or another in one of our various "war efforts" have just given up. We used to think that we had some say about what our great deliberative democracy does, but we actually hear a constant and pervasive drum beat: "you don't; you don't".


Ultimately we just give up and go to the beach.