Letters to the Editor
Allie_
Published Letters: 1252 Editor's Choice: 109
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Memorial Day
[Read the article: Telling lies over good soldiers' graves]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can't help thinking about my dumb kid, the kid who's a friend of mine, the one who joined the Army because he wants to fight in Iraq. He's a good kid, not a great kid but a good one; he wants to fight for freedom. He wants to be a hero. He wants to have comrades in arms and share things with them that no one will understand who wasn't there. All of these things make him a good kid. That he lacks the intellectual rigor to question whether going to Iraq will accomplish any of these things keeps him from being a great one. Someone told him Saddam Hussein was behind the WTC attacks. Who? I ask. Where did you get that idea, not even the president claims that. He has no answer. He absorbed his dumb ideas from the air, as far as he can tell me. America is blanketed by a miasma of dumbness and it seeps into the kid's brain, and he and his best friend go down to the recruiter's office together.
On Memorial Day, my dad tells me a story about the early days of Vietnam. He was a "contractor," in other words certainly not a U.S. officer there to teach the Rhade tribesmen how to use American weapons. In a tiny little Vietnamese village he bumped into another American officer who had been with him in Korea. "I'm a telephone salesman," his buddy said. "What the hell are you supposed to be?"
More than 40 years later, he and that same guy call each other on Memorial Day and joke about it on the phone. There really is a bond between them that no one can understand who wasn't there.
My dad spent 25 years in the military. While he was in Korea, in Vietnam, he deeply believed in what he was doing. He has always been a thinking man; unlike my dumb kid, he mostly knew lies were lies and who was telling them and why. When he tells stories of those days, a genuine fondness for the people, the places, comes through his voice, and his eyes smile. He believed, at the time, that Communism was bad and that America had an obligation to help the people of Vietnam fight it. He thought war could make things better.
Today he says: They were kids. Some of them, all they had was a pair of sandals made from tires and a pair of black pajama bottoms and they still fought us. We would have had to have killed everyone in the country to make them stop fighting us. He says, I can't imagine what could possibly be worth that.
Dumb kid says: Yeah, he says that now, but he HAD his war. And I want to shake the kid until his brains rattle out his ears, but I also understand what he's saying. My dad has a presence. He's a man, no one doubts that, especially not him. He has nothing to prove. He knows who he is and what he's made of. The dumb kid is a dumb kid. No one respects him, especially not him. I want to see the kid get from point A to point B, but I want to see him get there alive, and I want to see him get there without killing anyone else, please. He doesn't get it that my dad still whimpers in his sleep at dreams of his weapon jamming. He doesn't know about the rages my father fought for years and finally vanquished. He doesn't understand how much of my father's war was fought after he came home, in spite of everything he'd seen and done, and that what I most respect about my father today is his gentleness, his restraint, his humility.
There should be a summary here, something which draws all of this together and makes it make sense, with a moral lesson at the end of the day. But there's not. At the end of the day, the dumb kid is going off to war for dumb reasons, nothing makes sense, and I'm left with deep frustration and fury towards the old men who have never seen a battlefield themselves but have no qualms about lying to send kids there. No lessons. Just waiting and praying.
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where is normal?
[Read the article: Jordin sparks "fat" debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Recently I read an interview with an ex-model. She had a baby, and didn't want to go back to her (anorexic) model weight. The modeling agency told her they had no place for her, but if she gained more weight, she could become a plus-size model.
What the hell is wrong with us that there's nothing between anorexic and plus-size? What does it say about our society when "normal" is not allowed?
Y'all, I've been a model, albeit a local model doing wedding trunk shows in the South. I was 17, 18, 19, 20 at the time, and I had a bmi of just about 18. I never dieted; at that age, I was naturally active and naturally skinny. I used to faint in the shower in the mornings from low blood sugar sometimes, and I got frequent colds. A few years passed. I gained a little weight, maybe 20 lbs. Suddenly I stopped getting colds all the time. I was stronger. I didn't faint. Men still told me I looked good, but women started sharing diet tips, and the clothing industry clearly told me they had no intentions of making clothes that would look good on me.
Obese is unhealthy. Yep. But so is underweight. In fact, if you run the statistics, you can see that underweight is more unhealthy than obese. Any insurance actuarial table can tell you that. It's not hard information to get. The healthiest weight, according to the actuarial tables, is not underweight. It's not even normal. The longest-lived people are the slightly overweight, followed by those of normal weight (who are fat, according to media standards). The shortest-lived people are the underweight, followed by the obese. Didya know that?