Tuesday, August 21st, 2007
What Mikey said
Via the fine folks at Sadly, No!, Our Lady of the Internment Camps whines about the sudden dearth of maturity on the Internets:
Longtime readers are familiar with the brilliant work of Diana West. She has been a guest-blogger here and I frequently link her trenchant Washington Times columns. Today, her first book debuts: “The Death of the Grown-up: How America’s Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization.” I was delighted to read the manuscript and provide an endorsement. The book is a brilliant diagnosis of our backward baseball cap culture and its intellectual and moral deficiencies, which have profound consequences for a nation at war.
S, N! commenter Mikey quickly takes her to task:
Hey, Michelle, come over here and sit down. Give me an hour or so to tell you how I “grew up”.
Because you are an insulated, insular, priviledged american bigot, you are quite comfortable cheering for war and demanding we as a nation grow up. Sadly, hypocritically perhaps, or perhaps just ignorantly not understanding the role war plays in growing up.
Frankly, I could have used a little less growing up, and a little more childhood. At 18 years old, I didn’t need to see the things I saw. I didn’t need to learn the things I learned about the world.
And because you are addicted to hatred, you want to inflict that caliber of horror on kids all over the world. Our kids, and “theirs”. To what end? To what bloody, selfish, pathetic end, dammit?
When we are all veterans, having killed, having lost friends and loved ones in horrific ways, having cradled a young strangers head while he bleeds out, shivering in the hot afternoon sun, having fired the rounds that helped a child to “grow up” more quickly by killing his mother, what will we have accomplished? Will that somehow be a better society? Will we be better people? Will you have learned that hatred only breeds death?
No, Michelle, it is you and your arrogant, bigoted friends safely ensconced in your suburban paradise, where the worst that can happen is a splinter in your finger from that darn garden gate, that need to grow up. You need to understand that in war, everybody loses, and that fighting in a war is not honorable, does not fill you with glory, does not protect you from the people who hate YOU.
When you have grown up a little, you will have learned that it is a proud, honorable human who lives at peace with his neighbors, who finds a little discussion, a bit of negotiation, perhaps a smidgen of commerce to be a better solution to disagreements than killing and destruction.
As a grown up, you will find that lifting up your fellow human brothers and sisters, helping them be more, and better, and healthier, is infinitely more rewarding than killing them and wrecking their stuff.
A genuine adult understands that they are making a choice. They can choose a path that leads to eternal conflict, hatred, destruction, fear and back to more hatred, or they can find path to peace and prosperity. It doesn’t need to be surrender - but it doesn’t need to be war either…
Amen, man.
