30+ years later Vietnam is still being fought from the political sidelines

[Blue_Roses]

Dick Cavett had it right last night on Hardball when he said we haven't moved too fast past this. My dad was in WWII and I heard him tell a few war stories, but mainly it wasn't something he wanted to talk about. But these swift boaties...geezee...give it a rest and move the hell on.

John O'Neill has been proven a liar and Thurlow is too. The media needs to put this to rest and talk about the issues.

[politicat]

1. We have not reflected on any of our wars or conflicts.

In the 60's and 70's, the British were thinking about how WWII had affected them and what they had learned and lived with. We had fought not one but two wars in that time; we did not reflect upon what we had done to our children who lost fathers and uncles, to our men who came back with only a third of their soul intact; to our dead.

We eventually put up a wall and engraved names upon it. We called that memorial and never understood the true meaning of the term. Monument without true memory and comprehension are only tombs, not memorials.

We cannot possibly honor and remember our dead while we're creating more.

No, Vietnam is not over. To quote Gary A. Braumbeck:

Violence never really ends, no more than a symphony ceases to exist once the orchestra has stopped playing; bloodstains and bullet holes, fragments of shattered glass, knife wounds that never heal properly, nightmarish memories that thrash the heart ... all fasten themselves like a leech to a person's core and suck away the spirit bit by bit until there's nothing left but a shell that looks like it might once have been a human being. From the story "Safe", copyright 1997, first published in Psychos, edited by Robert Bloch.

My father still fights Vietnam, every night he has a nightmare, every time he has to look at red meat.

Politicat