Praying for Sense

As I sat through mass yesterday, my daughter Sophia by my side, I was struck when during the normal requests for prayers the monotone voice reading them said "for the men and women in the armed forces fighting for peace-- we pray". "fighting for peace"...hmm.

I had to think about this, as I couldn't get a handle on such an oxy-moronic thing to say. Fighting for peace--wow. I was under the impression to fight for peace would be to exhaust all possible avenues within the world community ie: diplomatic options, humanitarian assistance, maybe democratic regime changes. Yet here I was in church of all places where I was encouraged to say prayers in support of fighting. Not that PinF is opposed to war. When they're necessary-(wars)-- I'd be praying for the bullets to hit their marks. Take the Falklands, the Argentinians asked for and got a war. The Taliban-- again, never was there a more deserving and oppresive bunch of punks who deserved to have their asses thumped, I prayed those missiles found their marks as well.

This mess in Iraq is just that-- a mess. No one doubts or denies the danger that fundamentalist Islam poses to the civilzed world. It also goes without saying that Sadaam was a very evil man who committed countless atrocities agains 100's of thousands of people, both in Iraq and to its bordering neighbors (Iran, Kuwait). The problem is, as I open my newspaper every morning and see the wars of calamity befalling this country right here in our midsts (New Orleans, Missisippi, California), is that Iraq was NOT a war we needed to fight. I know, I know, Sadaam gassed 5,000 Kurds...yeah, yeah and he gassed tens of thousands of Iranians too during his war with them(where were all the WMD protestors then?). But what was it specifically that he was poised to do to us? Oh yeah-- WMD's, that's the reason we spent this 200 billion dollars. Kind of funny when all the World Trade Tower attackers came from our so called "ally", (Saudi Arabia), funny how we didn't declare war on them?

My point is this....I opened my Palm Beach Post paper this week and saw the first female soldier was killed in action from Palm Beach County. And what is so strange about this you might ask? Well for some it might be the fact that she was a woman, which in itself is kind of rare in war. Yet that isn't what struck me at all. What struck me as odd and particularly wasteful about this loss of life in particular was just a single sentence in the Palm Beach Post article. This young woman's name was Elizabeth Jacobson, 21 years old. She was by all accounts that I've read, a young lady who had trouble adjusting after her parent's divorce, yet she was beginning to find her direction in life. As I read her story it became clearer that she, like so many others her age was a young woman trying to find her path, unfortunately for her it lead her to the wrong place at the wrong time. She had hopes, dreams, and seemed just as naive as many other 21 year-olds. Yet here I was reading the obituary of a young woman cut down in her prime, another victim of an angry Islamic militant radical with much more hate in his heart than Ms. Jacobson could ever hope to match with the boundless love in her's. She was an airman in the Air Force, not typically a role that would seem to be too dangerous even in a war zone, apparently not so in this case.

Thus Ms. Jacobson became the first female casuality of the war in Iraq from Palm Beach County, a distinction granted her by a flawed policy fighting a sensless war. Oh and that one sentence? By the time she was deployed to Iraq in June, the changes in her were obvious. "I think she really just turned into a woman when she went away," Steinhoff said. Now that's the second oxy-moron concerning this war that I've read in as many days. "...she turned into a woman when she went away...", too bad she had to turn into a dead woman when she went away.