Give Death Meaning

I touched on a subtle method the media uses to sway public opinion in “a bit fruitless”, the coverage of the mother of a KIA solider that is camped out at the Bush ranch wanting to see him shows how the media gets on message and stays on message. By picking the stories that get the news, they get to give the country the impression they want, and as evidenced in our local paper the other night, this then allows the local Opinion Editors to pick up the strain and press it further.

First of all, there is ALWAYS some protester type around a President of either party wherever they go. During the last couple years of the Clinton Presidency there would almost always be one or more young women that would dress up in berets like the one Monica Lewinsky wore in one picture or a set with knee pads on in the front row. The mainline media almost always ignored them, and one needed to get on a “Drudge” or other source that was willing to report it in order to be aware of it. 

There are always “the insane” on any issue from insanity to space aliens to saving the one toed newt.

There are few sadder things in the world than a mother that has lost a child, but a mother that has lost a child in the service of our country that has to ask “why” is one. Last fall a 17yr old Eagle Scout fell off a bluff up by Red Wing and died, we contributed to a memorial project that will be done for him. In the past week or so, one young man of 21 was killed in a motorcycle accident in the area, and another 17 year old was killed when his car drifted over the center line and was struck by a semi. If one has faith in God in those cases, we trust him to have a reason, for those that have no faith, this is a random world, and death is just part of the random process. Meaningless.

I’m often struck by the difference between the way a conservatives and liberals generally look at some kinds of death. First, 9-11. I’ve heard multiple liberals utter some version of “Only 3K people died on 9-11, yet over 40K die on our highways every year, and nobody is going to war over that”. Somehow they equate a willful act of terrorism with an accidental result of a transportation system, and at some point I’ll blog on that. While conservatives tend to not say it, I believe because it is completely obvious, a death in service of our country is considered to be hugely more meaningful and easy to understand than a death on a highway, from a fall, or a host of other reasons that we hear of all the time which befall people at young ages and other.

The point of the media though is that they WANT the deaths of servicemen to be seen as “meaningless”. Dying on a road when your “mission” was to get some milk and it was a “failure” since you didn’t get the milk home is easy for a liberal to understand. It is meaningless, the way that life and death should be to a liberal. Volunteering to serve your country, removing a man that murdered 10’s of K from torture, started two regional wars, used poison gas on his own people from power, and taking part in a giant effort to form the first stable democracy in the middle east, that is very hard for a liberal to understand, since it seems to give “hints” of higher purpose.

This is an area that it is hard for me to plumb the depths of the liberal psyche, but I believe the answer lies in the importance of meaningless to a liberal. If there WAS anything such as “shared meaning”, or “higher purpose”, it could mean that many of their assumptions for life were flawed. The phrase “God and Country”, often used in concert with the idea of a solider going to battle comes to mind. If people really do believe that some beliefs, some thoughts, some ways of living are “better than others”, than there might be some legitimate reasons to go to war. To protect our way of life from random terrorism to the extent possible, to save others from tyranny, to stop genocide, to provide the chance to others for freedom, these might all be causes worth giving your life for, or taking another life for.

The battle of the liberal is often a battle against meaning, so it becomes especially strong when the issue of “what is worth fighting and dying for” comes in. To the liberal, that is easy, to coin a phrase from a 60’s anti-war anthem; “Absolutely Nuthin”. There are no values or thoughts that exceed the value of a meaningless life. Suicide, abortion, or euthanasia are all “freedoms” that the liberal seeks to maximize, because since life lacks higher purpose, it is “enjoyment” that gives it “dignity”, and war not only can shorten the party, it isn’t enjoyable. 

There is no “miracle of life” to protect and cherish, only a vast series of random actions that caused a meaningless consciousness to arise. The thought that one group of people would hold their random thoughts and values to somehow be so much “better” than another group that they would go to war is completely indecipherable to the liberal mind.

So they battle to reduce the deaths of all soldiers to meaningless. A mother’s cry that her son’s death is meaningless is magnified across the nation since it meets with the liberal’s view of the war, and the President is asked to “explain again”. Thus, the never ending battle between meaning and the abyss continues on as it has since Lucifer first fell from the heavens and God first called order from chaos.