Lines

I ran into an old friend at the armory a couple of drills ago. He's a young man who was in my 4-H group a number of years ago. His family lived down the way from us, and I was good friends with his mom and all the kids hung out together. He's now an army MP headed to Afghanistan soon. His family had long ago moved to town, and he gave me the number for his mom and dad and said hey, give them a call. I hardly recognized him when I saw him in uniform, he had grown so much.

I tried the number and didn't get through, so the next drill, when I was in town, I dropped by their house on the way out to see if they were home.

It was a good visit and we caught up on old times, and then the subject of some what I had done with the anti-war thing came up.

I explained my reasoning for what I had done, and we had a few jokes and some more conversation.

I asked my friend with her son leaving for Afghanistan soon, how she felt ...how she was doing with it.

I'm paraphrasing this next, but essentially she said she had told him that she knew he was doing what he wanted to do, that she didn't want him worrying about what she was doing or that she was worrying about him while he was doing his job, and that she supported him.

Both her husband and her were on the opposite end of the political spectrum. It was rather pointed, her response.

We wrapped it up, and I soon left because I had somewhere else I had to get too. But we didn't say, hey lets do coffee sometime, or exchange numbers.

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I don't know what I expected, and I'm not mad...more sad than anything. I think people fool themselves when they talk about 'political perspective' and 'viewpoint'. I think there's a line, visible or not, and I knew if I stepped out here I would likely cross it and there is no going back and its a war and you have to pick a side. You don't get to straddle the damn thing.

It's a war, and that means one side or the other.

And alot of people I care very much about, I ended up on the opposite side of, and I'm not really sure how that happened.


I know my grammer and punctuation sucks, I'm just not in the mood to change it tonight.

I will be back later to clean it all up.