Re: Growing God in a Cornfield Near Toledo

Life is messy, Rudy. Thank you for your most recent post. I am an aging high school teacher from a rural area that supplies many young people for the killing fields abroad. The young people I tell good bye from this tiny high school at their graduations often enlist in the military for countless reasons, non of which relate to wanting to kill people. Some, because they are poor and their great grandparents were immigrants who were so used to the sufferings in the old country they have handed on a legacy of doing one’s duty for one’s country(and they love this country for all of its weaknesses). Many of my students are Native Americans. The govt. takes my students and trains them to kill; most survive, occasionally some do not, but they allreturnk here changed. One of my recent graduates packs an infantin her arms, the child of a young Marine blown up, not because he yearned to kill but because doing the Marines is what his family does. I lived through the VietNam war years and no one on the college campuses cared so long as the Mexicans, farm kids, and Native Americans were over there: the pot-smoking kids started demonstrating, burning flags, etc. only when they feared for their own hides. I wandered through those years knowing the frat brats were right in resisting the war, but also knowing that some of my favorite boys were over there--one was killed, one was maimed--I was lucky because I was a girl. The hypocrisy in that war we shut down was apalling. I was a young journalist for a college newspaper, didn’t have the money most of the kids did, and wandered from demonstration to demonstration trying to sort it out---and am still sorting it out. These people who enlist in the military--we cannot hate them. Those who cry foul when we, an aggressive empire, go forth to do our conquest thing--we cannot hate them. Your NDE is finally bringing closure to those terrible years for me--and to these terrible years in which we now live.
I will not hate. In the polarized political climate we live in, I will hate neither Republican, Democrat, Libertarian; Muslim, Jew, Atheist, Catholic. Life is messy, Rudy. Good people are doing bad things. Bad people are pretending to be good. We have before us, this day, sunsets that are blood red, sunrises that scatter forth peachy-streaked, vibrance; in the cruelest drought, browns have a vibrance that cries out that all, at the sublime level, is well, because one day we will attain that for which we are made: our death. Thank you for hanging in with this column: it has forever changed my life. ....................................................... Tweet