Thread to mourn the passing of the soul of John Kerry [View all]

[Ken Burch]

A figure walks upright in a suit. He answers to the name "John Kerry".

But that figure is but a shell. Its soul, its heart, its conscience, has departed.

It was a beautiful soul. It once called millions to struggle for better, gentler things.

It came home from war and took the only lessons a decent person can take from such a thing...that war is unwinnable and pointless, that it is a barbaric thing that decent societies must abandon, and that humane outcomes can no longer come from the use of force.

It asked amazing, transforming, life-defending questions...questions that still resonate today.

Questions such as "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

That soul was badly wounded in 2004...when the person who housed it said, speaking of a war in Iraq that he already knew was futile and useless "We can do better", and gave the millions of Americans who opposed that war no one to vote for, no one who cared about anything they cared about(most gave him their votes anyway, on "lesser evil" grounds, but no one who had followed the man in the Seventies really believed that much of what he believed then still lived in the man). But it still barely lived.

But it died in a Senate hearing room today.

It died when the person who once housed that soul said that bombing a country is nothing at all like going to war against that country.

Mourn, America. There is nothing sadder than a soulless shroud in a suit.

And remember the beauty of that soul by speaking out against all that that soul would have raged against, when it lived among us. That soul lived for peace. Its memory is dishonored by all calls to kill.

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