EPTIt is one of the most powerful things I have ever seen before in my life. I will be honest, he can sing pretty good, but he is not a "world class" singer. But that is not the point. Seeing a young, attractive man like that senselessly maimed from war, propping himself and his mic up with whats left of his broken limbs while singing a song about forgetting petty worldly ideals for world peace... that is literally poetry in motion. Sometimes things are not quite real to you until it they are made incredibly specific; until you have a person and a circumstance to bring things in focus for you. I am an american myself, and while I don't want to make this blog at all political, I have to say I have always been pretty against the Iraq war in general. However, honestly my reasons up till now have always been practical and political. It didn't hate the war for its senseless loss of life, I hated it for other reason. When you hear about the thousands of dead american soldiers and tens of thousands more dead Iraqi civilians and terrorists it just an empty number. Of course I had heard about road side bombs being set off by children before. I have even seen some clips on youtube and the news of grainy footage of american's soldiers killing or brutally abusing middle eastern men. When you are exposed to something like this, it's all very distant and so much of the relativity is lost. Seeing one guy that I liked on TV made all of that far more real to me than everything I have heard about the war before.
The Iraq war, and the wars going on currently in Afghanistan and other middle eastern countries, are no different than pretty much any war waged before them. It is the same price that gets paid each time; old rich men bicker and wage war with numbers while young men die fighting it and innocent people get caught in the crossfire. The very idea of war, looking at it purely as mass organized murder, is repulsive enough. In my mind I can almost justify that for abstract ideals like "liberty" and "domestic security", or other such nonsense. But when I see a young man like that, and his brother, and imagine the thousands of other young like them, I can't even come close to justifying that. There is really nothing so important in this world that it is worth that happening to little kids. It doesn't really matter if it was a terrorist road side bomb, or an errant US tactile strike, all that matters is that people are getting hurt for no reason.
It is pretty idealistic to imagine that people could get past hate, religious persecution and radicalism, greedy, ambition, ect. so that senseless wars might never happen. All I know is that I will never fight a war, or endorse someone who will wage war, unless the people I love are in genuine danger of something. It is not a complete picture but it is the only one I can live with. Sometimes in order to save lives you have to end some sure, but war as an institution, traditionally, has always been a vehicle to advance greed and exercise hate. It is a tool of domination and imperialism. It is completely without logic or compassion, and for anything gained by war, the price is nearly always infinitely too high.
