I imagine this is even worse in Africa or the Middle East, but the people I happen to have spent time with recently were from the former Yugoslavia, who have suffered horrible civil wars, and towards the end (fairly or not) blamed the rest of the world (esp. America) for not getting involved earlier in saving them.

They told me what a slap in the face it was on and after Sept 11, 2001, watching the world go into conniptions over 3,000 people, when they thought about the losses of their own families and countries, 10s and 100s of thousands. The betrayal they felt that everyone, even their own media, thought that 1 life in the US was more important than 100 lives in Croatia or 1,000 in Armenia or the Congo.

I like the idea of reflecting pools and simple walls etched with names. Let's think about the real future though if we were to go ahead with the expensive version. No one will pay $60M a year in perpetuity to keep this running. If we aren't sensible about this, then there's a very real chance that in the lifetime of the survivors the project will go derelict or be replaced --- and then how will the survivors feel?

And before that, while the money was still being spent, how will the international tourists and immigrants feel about seeing this display of conspicuous consumption while remembering the far greater horrors they left at home?

I don't mean to be insensitive, I mean to be empowering: You can give up right now if you want to. Your son is getting good grades, he's fed & clothed. That you haven't given up is your own choice.

People freak out when women don't choose to make the enormous sacrifices associated with motherhood. They call perfectly rational choices like letting a kid live with their father "unnatural". Maybe they want to deny how much suffering is involved, or to believe that somehow women are biologically incapable of feeling that suffering. B.S.

This is not to say you should give up. It's saying the choice is yours, and has always been. Maybe realizing that this is your own choice will give you the strength to live with it, but if it doesn't, that's OK too.

I agree with Cary though on one point --- he will always remember how much you fought to try to get him into another life. You can't tell now how that may help him in the future. But there are a lot of other good deeds you could do with your time and your passion. Do your best.

This is a great article, but I really wish the author had bothered to mention that Israel had been getting bombed from Lebanon by Hezbollah for weeks; they are at least as upset about that than about the soldiers. Lebanon's sin is allowing Hezbollah to attach a sovereign nation from within their borders --- they don't want to make a hard political decision so they are instead set with more violence. Of course, as the article points out, US Americans have just as much guilt by proxy as the Lebanese, since we let people commit war crimes with our tax dollars.

Clerks was an art-house classic for young male philosophy students -- I wouldn't say it sucked, though I did feel like I was doing something worthy to watch it.

But Dogma totally rocked. It's the only DVD I own. Sure it's still totally low budget, but it's way fun. I don't want to give anything away, but they cast God perfectly at the end of the film.

The only truly bad Smith movie I've seen is Jersey Girl, and even there it was kind of what you expect from an airplane movie + some small bits of brilliance. But I would be scared if Clerks II has migrated at all from Clerks towards Jersey Girl.

I haven't seen Chasing Amy, need to be on the right plane for that I guess.

I usually have a rule not to post twice on the same thing, but what the heck ---

I don't think Dogma was supposed to be shocking; the pro-choice stuff was just typical Smith humour. Anyone actually disturbed by or even seriously distracted by that stuff probably missed the real film. The movie is fundamentally a religious fairy tale -- given late 20th century American life, how could Christianity be true? I enjoyed it as an atheist raised religious a lot more than my friends who were always atheist did, because I `got' at the gut level the subtext of wanting to go back to the security of childhood faith. Putting the whole superhero thing back into the context all superhero stories actually allude to is also great.

I agree with Anonyomous 2 though; Rickman was a real drag on that film (sadly.) I also thought Silent Bob got slightly too big a role to hold his character in place. But who cares given how many really fun scenes there were.

The problem for both parties is that although a candidate in the center appeals to the most Americans, when all candidates are in the center most Americans feel no one is really representing them. Given the low voter turnout in the US, both parties could probably win by just putting someone in the center of their party rather than the center of the country, so their own party would feel more motivated to vote.

I do think it's possible that Bush is *such* a bad president people may have noticed though. If he really does prove the worst in history, it would be quite an indictement of democracy if the voters never reacted (well, it already is that he ever got elected in the first place. I was really worried about what was happening to half my country when he even got nominated!)