Misguided?...or just plain crazy?

[t4li3sin]

Makes me want to read "mass psychology of fascism" again.

You know what makes me ponder the most ? There it is;

Say we could have two parallel worlds, like two movies.
-In the first one, the mother goes away to war and leaves her kids, one and three, to some uncertain future. Major traumas and scars follow.
-In the second one, the mother stays home and cares for the same children. Say even the father, he stays home too and cares for them as well. Authoritarian family; usual sexual repression by the mother and father follow.

Now, we bring both dimensions back into one. We take the best in bioenergetics, orgonomy, vegeto-therapy, psychoanalysis, call-it-what-you-want-healing-of-the-fucked-up-living-being.
Take those kids to them and fix em up.
Which one will heal the quickest and the most?

Or better yet; watch each different scenarios and keep the movies going; will any of them ever completely heal or even seek out help ?

[Flowen]

I was struck this morning listening to the news by an interview with a young woman who, as a US Army soldier, will be deployed to Iraq this week. Because her husband is or will also be in Iraq with the Army, she will have to leave her two children ages 1 and 3, with someone else for the year or so. She enthusiastically explained how important she felt it was to go to Iraq to protect the US and fight for democracy. The National Public Radio interviewer projected the story as 80% patriotic and 20% wistful and sad sacrifice.

Have we come so far as to accept this as normal? The mother-child relationship is so important to the future health of children, particularly at that age, it is difficult for me to understand how a parent would be able to leave their young children for a high risk venture with such vague, controversial, and elusive (to put it nicely) benefit. Not just the young woman, but the fact that such deployments are permitted, and, our "democracy" allows it, screams institutional craziness and, is "brainwashing" too strong a term? We have been conditioned to not only accept such behaviour, but to admire it! At least we can still see it is sad.

Just another, but an obvious example, of how individual feelings are suppressed and subverted to dubious interests. The war on terror is not being fought on the battlefield, in congress, or in town meetings; it is being fought in our collective unconcious.

Just out of curiosity, any idea what other cultures, currently or in history, permitted husbands and wives to deploy together to fight a foreign, offensive (as opposed to defensive) war?