WAR IS PERSONAL: Why I am against attacking Syria:

[gopiscrap]

It is all well and good to watch sanitized pictures of war being perpetuated upon a people in a distant land. I remember as a child Vietnam coming home to me in black and white as I ate dinner in my apartment in Frankfurt, Germany. But I also remember I took it more serious than my counterparts because for me, war is personal. I want to tell you a bit of my story:

My mom lived as a child in downtown Frankfurt, Germany a major transportation hub of the Third Reich. Because Hitler felt that the children were the future of the Reich he decreed that the children need to be evacuated from the major cities. Because there was no transportation for them, my mom walked, and walked and walked. This was in the winter of 1943 at the age of ten years old. Because of walking through the Bavarians, through the ice and snow, she got frostbite and as a result when she was pregnant with me, the hormones raging in her changing body turned that into gangrene and she had to have her leg amputated in order to save the life of her baby (Me). My whole life I watched my mom struggle with walking, she had to constantly watch her weight, she wound up becoming a poor eater and died of a stroke at 39 years of age.

I was born I that German hospital 12 years after the war ended and it wasn't all that sanitary because of it. Because of that, I contracted a case of encephalitis. That left me with adhd in a time when it wasn't diagnosed, it left me equilibrium problems and balance. For both my mom and her leg issues and my adhd and not being to tie my shoes til I was a teenager, not being to ride a bike til I was ten and other things, I was mercilessly teased.

My dad: was a young teenager, volunteered for World War II made it out of there alive, because he had no high school ed the Army became his career...He was sent to Korea and then at the end of his career as an advisor in Vietnam. He was shot in early January 1961 by a Viet Cong sniper. I remember being awakened from my pre Christmas dreams a week before Christmas when I was 7 to see fireman working on dad but to no avail, he succumbed to the injuries he received in Vietnam at the age of 38 and on a snowy day 3 days before Christmas, I listened at grave site to the playing of taps and cringed at the rifle volleys honoring him. So for my early life I struggled with damaged wounded parents, and then with no parents and have grown up as an old soul. And yes, this will happen to the children of Syria, will happen and has happened to the future of Iraq, Iran and all those war torn lands. So once again for hundreds, thousands, millions: WAR IS PERESONAL!!!!

And folks, my tale of woe in miniscule to those of other lands and other peoples...I have met children of war and listened to their life narratives and what it has done to them, It has ruined many lives, it has sapped the potential of many others. And for what?

Power? Oil? Position? Revenge? Diversion?

And we have made more than our fair share of mistakes beating the drums of war....Havanna, Tonkin, Bagdhad and so many others. And in the public realm for me...we have wasted our potential as a nation...with war dollars we could have relieved food insecurity, boosted post secondary education, implemented a national health care system, mass transportation...but instead it has turned us into a mean, cynical nation...

so sorry for the rant..but for me WAR IS PERSONAL and I will never be for it! Thank you for letting me vent!

[Bjorn Against]

1. K&R, thanks for sharing

War is a truly horrible thing that should never be cheered.

[MotherPetrie]

2. K&R

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

3. Kick!

War is a racket.

[gopiscrap]

4. it sure is

I wish we had a huge war tax on companies that profit from war and that revenue to go into peace initiatives

[frazzled]

5. But there is already war in Syria, so your story makes no sense

The story you tell of your mother might be the story of any one of the 2 million Syrian refugees who have been displaced since the war began two years ago.

Yes, war is personal. It has been personal for the families of the hundreds of children who perished in the recent chemical attack.

I certainly don't want to send any Americans into Syria, and we have been promised that will not happen. But I also don't delude myself into thinking that American lives are all that are at stake, or that somehow if we don't have this limited attack that there is somehow "no war."

Let's have a little compassion for the people, on either side of the Syrian civil war, who are feeling very "personal" about the truly terrifying things they've been enduring these past years, and it's getting worse.

[gopiscrap]

6. That is the point I am trying to make

along with the point that with us bombing the nation we will just add more misery and death

[frazzled]

7. Stopping the ability to use chemical weapons would certainly ...

not lead to more deaths. That has been the sole aim of this entire thing. The proposal (serious, but also apparently the "force on the table" to leverage a negotiated stand-down on the chemical weapons) was always to limit itself to taking out Assad's ability to gas people in the course of this war.

We stayed out of it for two years and it has gotten increasingly worse.

PS: If the point you were trying to make was the one I have articulated, then I'm afraid you failed in making your case. Try to say what you mean next time. Instead of titling it "Why I am against attacking Syria," maybe it should have been "How can we stop the devastation of the civil war in Syria"? Otherwise, it's just another misguided "peace" post, that ignores that no peace exists.

[Iwillnevergiveup]

8. Very moving story, gopiscrap

Thank you for posting it. War is so senseless and heartbreaking, and you are to be commended for having survived great, unearned tragedy in your own life.

K&R

[gopiscrap]

10. Thank you that's very kind!

[merrily]

9. Recommended.

[Mnemosyne]

11. K&R