Are WE at war?

Well, good morning, YouTube. It's Tom. I just finished watching the latest of Peter's videos, and as usual, his words and his stories were moving and stirred lots of interesting thoughts for me. In particular, his recounting of being in a movie theater as a child and coming out and seeing a dogfight in the sky set up a real powerful contrast for me of what's going on today in the war that our soldiers are fighting in Iraq. A couple of things happen that bring this together. My wife Karen and I watched the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer pretty regularly. And almost since the beginning of the war, the NewsHour has something that it calls the Honor Roll. And the Honor Roll, if you haven't seen it, is just simply, as Jim Lehrer says every time they run this segment, here in silence are a number more of service, uh, US servicemen and women who have been killed in Iraq, and they run their photographs when the deaths are confirmed and the families have been notified, uh, and the photos are available. And they just simply run the name of the serviceman or woman, uh, their age and their hometown, and the photos are very, very different. I mean, some of them are people in uniform, some of them are people in civilian garb of different kinds, and, and they're all, you know, you just see them for a second or maybe two at the most, and, and then they're gone, you know. But these names and ages and hometowns just keep, you know, coming and coming several times a week on that show. And it's one of the few reminders outside of the you know, the daily reporting about the war. It's one of the few reminders of the actual people who are involved and who are actually dying in the war. Well, the other night there was an image, a picture of a young woman whose name and face flashed onto the screen, and it was one of those things that immediately you were captivated by this woman's picture. And her name stuck in my head. Her name was Emily Perez, and she was wearing a West Point uniform, the uniform of a graduating cadet. And it was just a striking photograph. So I said, wow, Emily Perez, I have to remember that name. Before I go any further, I just wanted to insert that photograph here so you could have the image of Emily Perez in your mind. As I'm talking a little more about. So I went to Google and googled Emily Perez, and I found that, lo and behold, The Daily Kos, which is a blog, a liberal blog, had written a story about Emily Perez just a day or two before. And What was striking was, you know, that here again was a name and a face that had stood out from the crowd. A young Black woman, a woman of color. I don't— I really didn't— I didn't want to go researching her life history except to say that, you know, here's a young woman, Hispanic or African American, who had gone to West Point. And had obviously achieved great things in graduating from West Point and now had been killed in Iraq. The point of me wanting to make this video is this: Peter's stories about World War II are stories of a people, a nation at war, and how he and his family were affected by that war. We're currently fighting a war in which most of us are not affected. Um, unless we've lost a family member, we don't feel the direct impact of the war that's being fought. And I think that we have to somehow try to keep this war more vividly alive in our memory so that it's not an abstraction, it's not just large geopolitical forces at work. It's real human beings like Emily Perez, like my nephew's son Bobby Pope, who was killed by an IED in Baghdad. Real people who are losing their lives, and the rest of us go on living our lives in an unaffected way. And that imbalance is really wrong. It's disturbing, and there's something the matter with a country being at war and none of us being affected in our day-to-day lives by it. So, Peter, thanks again for helping me to reflect on some things that are meaningful to me. So thanks again. Bye.