Thoughts on War: I saw one picture of graphic violence with respect to the latest insane Iraq mosque bombings. How can anyone steal the beauty of those mosques? They were simply gorgeous edifices constructed by the mind of man. The destruction of them is so sad and the annihilation of people even sadder. The carnage is unimaginable. It simply staggers me. I think with all the glory, all the parades and all the hoopla about war this is what war really is. It's not glory and it's not flag waiving. It is bodies ripped apart so one can barely identify that the corpse was once a human being. The man on a stretcher in an Iraqi "emergency room," the remnants of whose body I saw, was somebody's son, somebody's brother, husband or friend. The love of him has been drowned in a river of blood. His identity covered soon by the dust. Most of us who live here are lucky. We are not used to this kind of violence except if you were so unlucky to have been at Ground Zero on 9/11 or in the Oklahoma City Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. Generally speaking, we do not know the carnage that exists in Iraq except for the few who were so unlucky to be sent to that God forsaken place and are among our dead or wounded.

Then, of course, I think of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as recently I had the misfortune of seeing the graphic pictures of that too. It is unimaginable. Every day I think of the Holocaust and the ovens, the torture and death. I search for meaning where there is none. How can we do this to one another? Why? It is such a waste of humanity. Somewhere among the dead of recent wars perhaps lies a scientist, an artist, a playwright, a mathematician or a biologist who cures disease. Why do we waste life with such ease? What religion tells human beings to do this to one another? It is beyond my understanding. I simply do not know. I have been told history is written by the victors and that I believe is so. Really, though, in the end we are ALL the losers. War today, I believe, has no winners. I shake my head in disbelief and wonder if I will ever live to see the senseless violence end.