Ma'am:
It's been 19 months since you posted your email about your son. I surely hope he's doing well, just as I hope you're doing well.

Having just joined this webgroup, coming to the thread you posted to was serendipitous. Distress and healing certainly pertain, holistically, to every facet of our lives - especially those governed by primary emotions, especially love - and above all, the seemingly miraculous human capacity for compassion.

Your post made me wonder how many other parents have been and are in the same information gap that you were then - and hopefully have resolved. With the advent of an ever evolving high technology, the battlefield has been delivered to our living rooms in living color and living glory; thanks to CNN, we're comfortably insulated from the terror and horror of war and death, viewing daily carnage in the best spirit of a viscious video game. The high tech we count on for email, cells, etc. we count on for being in touch with loved ones. Yet we're reduced, especially as parents and loved ones, to not connecting with our kids and significant others on the hot zones, for security reasons, reduced instead to viewing for them on CNN. Something is dramatically amidst in that visual equation. Others take your hands in the parent's pain and fear expressed in your post. bravo for having broken the ice to speak for all of us.

my kids are all grown up and not in the military. nevertheless, I'm a parent. it seems to me that rite of passage in becoming a parent involves protecting not only one's own kids, but kids everywhere...and families. as such, i'm wondering if the situation has grown better since 19 months ago, or are parents as much as ever in the dark? I trust you've connected many a time with your son, perhaps that he's served his term and is at home.

I do confess to feeling between your lines a parent's anguish - such that it ripped to my bones. War stinks. We face an unprecedented evolutionary turning point, one in which my old teacher Joe Campbell used to say involved asking what is our social group, and the answering being humanity itself. Kids everywhere suffer, as do their parents, grandparents, everybody. We don't have a guiding mythic image of peacemakers in our culture, while deparately needing them. as such, i feel sending kids off to war is utterly barbaric, as is the needless worry and strife imposed upon parents and grandparents. we've yet to consider what a warrior of peace might be - which is my work with the guiding mythic image of the bodhisattva/awakener persons.

I do hope your son is doing well and that you are in contact with him. And I do thank you in your message for a wake up call - thoroughly serendiptious, thoroughly unexpected, thoroughly alarming in the best sense of the term.

with warm regards & all best wishes for peace profound,

Ken O'Neill
Wimberley, Texas Hill Country

I, perhaps, should not speak on the war. Never having met
the man, I still hold our President in absolute contempt. He stands for everything
that I abhor. I will state - Never in our history has America invaded
a soverign nation pre-emptively. Please read the article by Anna Quindlen,
"The Last Word", Newsweek - March 10, 2003. PS - I "am" a liberal.