The folley of detachment

People are social animals, culture itself is an expression of that sociability and anthropologists who go into the field have to remember that. What brings this up, a guild member whom I also consider a friend is going to Iraq soon, he is happy to be back in the military about sad to go. I know that all I can do is wish him luck and hope for the best. As a pacifist and a left leaning individual I think that the war in Iraq was never legitimate to begin with, but as a friend I know that saying this will not help anything. There are probably a number of reasons that my friend is back in the army and that he is being shipped off to Iraq again but that does not mean I have to like them.

My friend is going to Iraq, not for the first time either and it saddens and troubles me. It troubles me because when my friend mentioned it, my perception of him changed a little bit, like suddenly there was this secret and scary part of him, this mysterious 'soldier' aspect that kind of scared me. More than that it's that I am facing the possibility of never seeing a person again, and I am confronted by the possibility of war.

When I visited New York recently with my family we came to a church and there were white ribbons attached to the outside fence, the woman who gave the tour told us that each ribbon represented a soldier who dies in Iraq and pointed to some ribbons that represented the Iraqi people who also died. Those ribbons made me want to cry and they made my mother angry for the same reason: I am not so different from many of the young men whose names were floating in the wind on that day in New York. Looking at that fence, just like hearing my friend talk was confronting my own mortality, even if it was not very likely. My mother got angry because she was confronted with the possibility of losing a child, because the ribbons evoked the possibility of never seeing me or my little brother again.

"It's a horrific thing that happens to a parent when his or her child is killed or dies from any cause before the parents" Writes activist Cindy Sheehan. "... when you arrive at the moment that you learn that your child is dead, that's the point when you pray for death yourself. But I didn't die."

this is part of an interview with her http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ta_FKd1JKM

It's funny that the game world of WoW is one at war, and I have seen signs of it. There are places in the game world that have struck me as sad and beautiful at the same time for a number of reasons. There is a quest in Azuremyst island where you have to rescue furbolg cubs as you intervene in a war between furbolg tribes (http://www.wowwiki.com/Furbolg), there is an NPC in the badlands, a robot who dreams of being a real boy, the fictional world of Azeroth is full of war stories of all sorts, some beutiful and others horrific, yet none moved me as much as the prospect of my friend going to Iraq. Maybe it is that even as the relationshipsbetween players are real, the game world itself is not and so our relationship to the world is different from our relationship to this reality.

The sight of the city guards spitting on death knights made me think of these lines from the Hugh Lloyd Jones translation of the Agamemnon "For those they sent away/they know, but instead of men/ to each one's home/there came back urns and ashes." And yet the thought of my friend going to Iraq bothers me more...