Blogtrek

Missing the Demonstration

I thought the Valentine Tree service we had at our church on Sunday was one of the better services of the year. We honored the people that meant the most in our lives by constructing a tree that bore love hearts. We also had some great music - Lydia Adams Davis playing "Song of Life". I bought one of her CDs afterwards and played some of her music on the way to a meeting tonight. I heard some other good tunes, such as "There's a Moon out Waiting for You", but what struck me the most was "Did I Miss the Demonstration?" It was the lament of a Vietnam War veteran, S. Brian Wilson, whose legs were cut off by a train during a demonstration in 1987.

She sings about the splitting noise of helicopter blades, whether he would live through it all, and the blood on his hands from the people he killed in Vietnam - soldiers, women, babies, and elders, to a movie that readily caught my ear. The person she is singing about this has written several moving pieces of prose on the Internet. The song has meaning to us now because our government is about to engage us in yet another conflict - Persian Gulf War II. What will happen in this war?

I received an email today that said a study was made of this war using various mathematical formulas. It estimates US casualties at about 79 and Iraqi casualties as about 3000 with a max possible of about 19,000. It does not make any estimation of civilian dead. It predicts the US will win.

Maybe so, but I regard it as too dangerous. France, Germany and Russia are seeking to block US efforts. They are trying to prevent a war from taking place, and are trying to maneuver things so that the dispute can be settled diplomatically, perhaps with Saddam getting exile and Iraq becoming a UN protectorate or something else. This is because war is horror no matter how it takes place. The best that can happen is a wild prosperous oil party for America in the middle of this decade. The worst that can happen is a tremendous catastrophe. Is it worth taking the risk?

Lydia should sing this song everywhere she goes now until this crisis is settled. I don't know of any case where a song stopped a war, but maybe it will work this time. I think she should give it a try.