I guess it is veteran's day.

[sapote]

I still don't know how I feel about embedded journalists. I just caught the end of a report on NPR around 4:15, and wow, that's some soldiers being hauled out of burning wreckage on the radio. Two people died, but by god, they bleeped out all the profanity in post-production.

It's not entirely easy to explain what we're doing as a country or why we're doing it, and so it's hard to figure out exactly what people are dying for, and so it's hard to know if the accurate response is to think these people died for something or to think what a goddamn waste of life. It's really hard to take something as flat out as people dying and insert it into complexity and history and the painful give and take of the last century of human history, to take it and hinge it to a reason and say "because, therefore". I have my theories about the world, and the fact of people younger than I am dying under a burning truck in Kandahar sucks all the air right out of them. It's upsetting. I don't know if there's any logic that can wrap it up neatly. I try not to make meaning out of other people's tragedies - I think it's sloppy thinking. But when these particular tragedies are tragedies that we voted on, I've got to try. And it's not working.