Linkmeister

Howl

Anna Quindlen wrote a really poignant column for Newsweek last week entitled "The Weight of What-If." Excerpt:

But there's nothing quite like a protracted war to shift the landscape of existence wholesale. Stand in front of any war memorial or military cemetery, in a small town, in the capital, in Gettysburg, in France, and the what-ifs are heavy in the air. The marriages precipitously ended or never made. The children orphaned or never born. The families broken, the towns denuded. On a visit to Moscow years ago I was struck by the absence of men of a certain age. Then someone reminded me that some estimates had 13 percent of the Soviet population, mostly male, killed in World War II.

I remember William Shirer or another World War 2 historian/journalist writing that France essentially lost an entire generation of young men during The Great War. Obviously that's not going to happen to America with this war, but George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their enablers have created "what-ifs" for over 3,000 American families who will never know what those young men and women might have accomplished. They have created "what-ifs" for over 20,000 American families whose loved ones have dreadful injuries from which they will never fully recover. And they have created "what-ifs" for some unknown number of Iraqi families whose men, women and children will never contribute to the ideal of a democratic Iraqi society, one of the stated goals of this war in the first place.

It's time for the what-ifs to stop.

Posted by Linkmeister at April 13, 2007 09:21 AM | TrackBack