Tag Archives: Tragedy

Fault lines and fissures

To the people who blame Joe Biden solely for what’s happening in Afghanistan after America’s 20-year campaign there – your partisan underwear is showing.

What’s happening in Afghanistan today is not the fault of one person alone. But to understand that, you’d have to remove your partisan glasses and take a deeper look at the history of our involvement there. I know that takes a little time and effort. I know it’s easier to bash-post the President, especially if your objective is to knock him down a peg or two.

A government does not fall as quickly as it did in Afghanistan without severe foundational problems – and such problems did not occur overnight (or since Joe Biden became President).

Our military success in Afghanistan only masked the many issues that plagued an ineffectual and weak Afghan government and an Afghan military that lacked what the Taliban have in spades (a core of fighters willing to die for a cause).

That so many Americans are eager to use the human tragedy of what’s going on in Afghanistan to score political points reveals dangerous fault lines in our own society.

Newtown CT, December 14, 2012

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When I heard the news out of Newtown CT yesterday, I was of course saddened. I stopped working for a while and watched the news reports, worked a little bit more before heading to Providence to watch my son play basketball.

When not directly affected by such tragedies, we absorb the news of them, we process that news (fairly quickly it seems to me), and we move forward.

Next week, for the vast majority of us, life will go on. We’ll put our little ones on the school bus or shout a goodbye to our teenagers as the fly out the door in the morning, and we will do so with only the slightest bit of hesitancy.

I suppose our capacity to push through these types of events is a survival mechanism. Natural selection has weeded out the trait of extended emotional grief. Our ancestors saddled with that trait did not survive long enough to pass it along, and I suppose that is a good thing. I only wish we could find a place somewhere between “crawling into bed and pulling the covers over our head” and “life goes on”.

This week will have a familiar sickening feel to it. We’ll watch the news coverage and walk around a bit dazed. We’ll struggle with the feelings that come with resigning ourselves to the negative in life. We’llfeel it behind our eyes, on the back of our necks and shoulders, and in the pit of our stomachs.