Warning: The following posts are about a vacation (with a little politics thrown in). If you prefer other fare, come back next week.
Contrasts are illuminating.
This past weekend, my family drove down to Jacksonville. We stayed the first night in a friend's little place there. A retired sportswriter and copy editor, he had shelves of books on sports. What caught my eye, however, was his framed poster of Elvis advertising Elvis' last scheduled concert, the one he never made it to. Our friend also had a framed picture of himself in his younger days, looking rugged and charming.
The next day, we moved on to Ponte Vedra Beach, just south of Jacksonville. Our hosts there were staying in a huge house on the beach, complete with marble foyer, two curving staircases and big windows in the living room overlooking the pool and beach. It was no San Simeon, but it spelled luxury. It was beautiful.
Even in this affluent area of retirees, the movie "Fahrenheit 9/11" was well-attended. OUr host went to a mid-afternoon show on July 5 and found the theater half-full, mostly with older people.
The beach on July 4 was a riot of fireworks. People seemed to be gleefully celebrating their independence of the law -- which I'm told prohibits fireworks here.
We watched from the pool. Brilliant red, green and yellow starbursts shot from the beach exploded in the sky over the ocean. The children and I ran down the path from the pool to the beach, with fireworks bursting overhead, lighting up the sea grass and the sand at our feet.
For a moment, I lost track of where I was. There was something profoundly unsettling about running through loud explosions. The Iraq war may be going on half a world away, but on this Independence Day it's too close to home.
I had a real sense of American affluence and what it really costs.
That's because these things seem clear to me:
The United States is dependent on oil from Iraq and the surrounding countries. Therefore, our government feels a need to control what goes on in that area -- unlike, say, to control what goes on in Rwanda.
Not only did Iraq have nothing to do with the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States, but it also had no weapons of mass destruction. So those justifications for invasion have fallen flat.
And if the main reason for invading Iraq was to liberate its inhabitants, why has this country lived in peace with many a brutal dicatator (Pinochet in Chile, for example) in the past?
Finally, it's entirely possible that more innocent people have died in our attacks in Iraq than were killed in the U.S. on Sept. 11.
We've got a quest for freedom and independence mixed up with a quest for money and power.
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