(no subject)

[pecunium]

A hard day. An hour and a half shooting photos in San Luis Obispo Creek, finding out the test prints I sent out have a four day turn around (which really means a week, unless I get them in on Monday morning) so that anything I want to hang in the show in early Oct. will be B&W, or needs Maia to finish up, because I am supposed to be at a planning conference for a mission in Ukraine this coming spring.

I then spent five hours in the darkroom (mostly successful, save that the last print was eaten by the print dryer, after I'd put the enlarger to bed).

Then I saw this, Neil Gaiman discussing what war is. He quotes Stephen Fry, elaborating Bertrand Russell. Because it is so worth reading, I will quote it too.

Bertrand Russell, the great philosopher and mathematician, got into terrible trouble by writing quite fearsome articles against the first World War when it began. He got all these letters from people who said, “My child is prepared to lay down their life for their country. Don’t you think that sacrifice demands some respect?” He wrote this extraordinary essay in which he said, “Don’t you understand? The sacrifice we’re asking of our young is not that they die for their country, but that they kill for their country.” That’s the sacrifice. To ask a child to kill someone else, whom you’ve never met. That’s a moral choice, pulling a trigger. Having a bullet hit you is not a moral choice. You don’t decide to be killed. It’s a terrible thing that happens to you. But killing something is something you do and that’s a desperate sacrifice. And we’re seeing that in the Iraq war. That’s what this poor Lynndie England did, this tragic soldier who was shot smugly smiling next to naked Arab prisoners. That’s the chickens coming home to roost. It’s not Americans being asked to die by President Bush. It’s Americans being asked to kill and to torture. Not necessarily by name. He doesn’t say, “I want you to kill this or that one.” Of course, politics isn’t that simple. Essentially that is what society does. It asks its young to kill, and that’s what we all have to live with.

I have to confess I have a certain fondess for Gaiman on the topic, because back in March of 2003, when I was crunching sand in Kuwait, he had the kindness to tell the world he'd read my comments to Electrolite and that they made the whole thing plainer, and gave him a deeper understanding of his father's war.

Read all of it, follow the links, and be certain he may have appreciated my telling him what it was like, but he didn't need it.







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Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'd love to open this, but I don't know who you are... which is the one condition I place on anonymous posts. It isn't even that I care really, but I have had some people being abusive to others, and that's the best compromise I seem to be able to make... if you want to be anonymous to the rest of the world, that's fine, but I need some idea who you are...

TK