Betzee, I believe the LW is a man... ("I attend a weekly group for men with PTSD/MST (military sexual trauma). The men in the group are mostly older, like me. ")

I have to take issue with the LW's description of himself as "wise." Yes, wisdom can be gained through experience, but it comes only if we use the experience to move away from ourselves and surrender our ego to the world. The bulk of the letter talks about how he did this thing, bestowed that on others, experienced such-and-such, but doesn't offer a whole lot about the lives he intersected with - they just seem to be road signs on his life's journey. Now he's older, alone, and alienated. His testimony is all about himself - he recounts a memory of young girls throwing flowers in the street when he was first wed, but doesn't tell us much about his bride.

It's hard, and frankly dicey to judge another from a few grafs in a net posting, but it seems to me that the LW needs to let go of himself if he's to make any meaningful connection in what lies ahead in his life. It's never too late.

the circular firing squad squeezes off another round.

...wiremonkey may accuse you of moral superiority and make you cry. BWAHHHHHAHAHAHAHAH!

OK, then, taking another woman's husband is sinful. The issue is not property rights; the issue is interfering in a marriage not your own, and abetting a person's breaking of a vow they made to another.

Nothing in the letter - nothing - indicates that this woman is in an open relationship. In fact, the description of the affair - text messaging, meetings once a month, phone calls - sounds like your garden-variety cheatin' scenario. LW's description of his lover having "the attributes of a cat" doesn't help. I've owned cats most of my life, and one of their attributes is sneaking around.

Why, oh why is it so hard for some people people to acknowledge the existence of right and wrong, and tostand up and say something is wrong? Yeah, there but for the grace of God go I, but if I did go there, I sure as heck would know I did evil.

...for saying what I was about to say, and most everyone else, including Cary, seems not to want to say - it's immoral.

I read comments that we should show compassion for the letter writer; that the woman (not the LW) bears the responsibilty; that the LW is dumb, powerless, etc.

Are y'all so far gone in nonjudgmental PC moral relativism that you no longer have any sense of right and wrong? Taking another man's wife is wrong, period - evil, immoral, sinful, whaatever you want to call it. There is no justification and there is no excuse.

It's a circular firing squad. So many years of catering to victim and interest groups.

Sooner or later, two would come up against each other and BAM!

The academy voters seem to have forgotten that "documentary" doesn't mean "political screed" (not counting "Penguins," which bordered on a kid's fiction film because of the rampant anthropomorphism of the voice over). I can get my fill of anti-war rants by tuning into Olbermann. For my money, the best docu of '07 was "Note by Note: The Making of Steinway L1037." No polemics, no hysteria, just a nonfiction film that cast a light on a world that I otherwise would never have seen.

Yeah, as a matter of fact, I do feel for victims of natural, or unnatural, disasters around the world. Do you? In fact, some of the big ones drive me to tears, and I'm not being facetious. Basic human decency, the quality of mercy, does not stop in one's own backyard (at least not in mine).

And Zandru, you're right, I didn't see your second post, but I still must disagree. Have you stopped feeling for those left dead, homeless or bereft by Hurricane Katrina? After all, it happened two-and-a-half years ago, to people a long ways away that we don't know. How about the cyclone in Bangladesh last November? Three thousand gone, a quarter of a million homeless, but it's no one I know. The Asian tsunami of 2004? Old news. Why doesn't everyone just get over it?

9/11, or any one of a number of horrors, may not have happened to you personally. But the thread that runs through all of these examples and countless other catastrophes, including terrorist attacks, is that they strike randomly, without warning. They can happen to any one of us, at any time - even you. When it does, we learn very quickly the meaning of charity and mercy, and the real measure of our fellow man - those who open themselves to the suffering of others, and those who say "get over it".

quote: Face it, if this were a healthy society, we'd have gotten over it long ago.

Kinda hard to get over it when the smell of burning bodies hung in the air for weeks afterward, and some of those bodies were your friends.

But, I guess out on Old 66, near the intersection of I-40 and I-25, it was always just another image on TV. Why not rip off the very specific image of the buildings collapsing for a cheap low-grade sci-fi flick? It seems for a lot of Americans outside of New York and Washington, it was never real anyway.

You are callous and lacking in basic human decency.