Article of the Day

Don't start nothing, won't be nothing, by Gregory Kane, is an excellent article about the morality of war and torture. I'm surprised I haven't read anything by him before: he's brief, to the point, and very convincing.

I remember where I was too, of course, even though I wasn't stateside. I'd just begun my Erasmus year at Vilnius University and I was at home in Riese. My uncle Alfonasas ran over to the house and yelled to turn on the television, that America was at war. I ran upstairs to get Sarunas Krukonis, who was living with me at the time. For at least a half hour he didn't believe it: he was utterly convinced that I must be playing a practical joke on him, or else that it's all a hoax.

My mother was in a windowless room with blocked cell phone reception in Brussels, I believe: the doors on this conference were locked until the delegates could hammer out a new strategy on education. Imagine her worry when she walked back into the world and was flooded with ambiguous sympathetic text messages from Lithuania: she thought I was dead.

The thought that she had to endure that for even ten seconds before getting touch with me brings tears to my eyes. Where can I sign up to waterboard terrorists myself?

Cross-posted here on my mother's remembrance blog.