Scribblings

And So This Is Christmas...

"Happy Christmas" is playing on the radio right now as I sit here remembering when I first heard it.

The song is by John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I heard it first around Christmas in 1971. I was a junior in high school and the carnage in Viet Nam was on the nightly news every darn evening. What I remember most from the war coverage was all the body bags. I thought it was sickening, so much that I deliberately turned off my feelings about it. What was the use? I thought. I couldn?t change it. If I couldn?t change it, then it was better not to feel it. This is a strategy I learned when I tried to cope with my dysfunctional family.

The country was being torn apart. On the one hand, young people were marching and demonstrating against the war. On the other, you had people who may not have agreed with the war but they loved and supported the country. I wouldn?t say that the young protestors didn?t love the country, they just wanted the war to stop. Sometimes the protests would become ultraviolent and people would start attacking each other. I would watch that news and I?d have very ambivalent feelings. I wanted the war to end, too, but just wasn?t sure what the best strategy would be to end it.

I know that John Lennon and Yoko Ono didn?t support the war. They wanted it to end, too, but they didn?t advocate violence. They?d have these love-ins and they just looked like a couple of very laid back hippies. When I heard the song, I thought, yeah, right as if this song is going to make a difference?the war isn?t going to end this year. It wasn?t quite over the next, either.

Over the years, I?ve heard this verse most often: ?War is over if you want it.? We have a choice. I guess we can still pass-the-buck by saying, well, I want peace but I have nothing to say about it ? it?s those government people in power. Well, there is something we can do about it on Election Day.

I?m worried, though, that by then Iraq will become another mess like Viet Nam. There just got to a point where we seemed to be going round and round in circles. More of our people got killed and we didn?t seem to be making any ground. More of our people have died since the ?end? of the war, killed by Al-Quaida and other terrorists.

We didn?t belong in Iraq in the first place. President Bush should have been patient and waited for UN support. We haven?t found Osama bin Laden, who was behind 9/11 and leads Al-Quaida. We haven?t found Saddam Hussein. We haven?t found any weapons of mass destruction, although that supposedly was the reason we went to war without waiting for UN approval.

Now that we?re not finding anything, the tune changed. There was an implied tie between Saddam Hussein and Al-Quaida ? and then that was proven false. So what are we doing there? We cannot win the war on terrorism in Iraq. The terrorists are not going to wake up one day, slap themselves on their foreheads and say, "What were we thinking? The Americans are not leaving! We should stop sending suicide trucks and cars and ambulances because we are not going to change their minds!"

It's not going to happen on our end either. I don't think anyone up top is going to say, "You know, these terrorists are not going to give up. We need to get out of there and find a different way to fight them."

So ... we're going to have a war of attrition or something. Some of us get killed, we hit some of them. They hit us again. We hit them. They hit us ...

I don't want to give up and give in to terrorists. But I think we should have picked our battle more carefully.

?War is over ? IF you want it.?

Unconscious Mutterings:

I say ? and you think ?

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