war

Having just watched the YouTube video of four United States Marines urinating on the bodies of dead Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, the question becomes what does this have to say about the American people and who we are as a war-making nation?

The Marines were members of a scout sniper team, highly trained combat specialists within the Marine Corps reconnaissance units. Along with their expertise in combat, they also are schooled in the rules of war.

I've always had a problem with the concept of hope.

It has seemed to me we too often are called to rely on hope as a call to face the future with blinders. It is to disregard the dark and focus only on the light, even if the light is a product of our optimistic fantasies. This optimistic hope is most often what we turn to when we live in denial of the truths that our lives encounter.

We are a nation at war. In spite of the fact we Americans think of ourselves as peace-loving people, we seem to be at war more than we are at peace.

We have one war going in Iraq from which we are supposedly trying to extricate ourselves. We have another war in Afghanistan and there we're trying to figure out how we might free ourselves. And now, we're opening up another front in Libya.