Considerations concerning a worthwhile debate

Well, there a number of things on my mind at present, and they are a disparate lot. But, there just may be some semblance of a thread which runs through them, if you'll forgive me for thinking "aloud" ...

I have not posted an original piece for over a week now; and, my existential anxieties about how to nurture a blog of the sort which I value as a reader have played a role in this, my, absence from the page (post). In the interim, as some of you have no doubt noticed, I have posted quite a number of third-party articles which I have appreciated and wish to help gain wider distribution.

The efficient, or most immediate, cause of my not publishing a piece earlier this week was Rebecca's, our daughter's and my traveling to Salcombe, Devon last Friday to celebrate Rebecca's father's 60th birthday with family. Although we returned home on Sunday night, the long-weekend jaunt to and fro seemed to take a toll on me. I was useless Monday, and have focused much of my time since on further familiarizing myself with the blogosphere, tools to access and contribute to it, copyright concerns, and reading what to me are stellar examples of a good blog.

Foremost amongst these blogs to which I aspire while finding my own way is Sharon Spiteri's Lost in Thought. I somehow stumbled upon LiT a few weeks back and noticed that, like me, Sharon blogs from East Sussex, England. I have since made her blog a frequent stopping place on my travels.

Sharon's writing is fresh, alive and hits on a masterful mix of substantive commentary and analysis while giving something of herself to her fellow travelers. As of last night, due to following her Sub|Bloglines link, her writings now drift to me as if in a bottle via an online news aggregator. Yet, still, I wander back to her site, to read her postings in full and to bask in the breeze of her spacious blog.

In doing so the past twenty-four hours, I have been watching the thread of conversation amongst her peers, but mostly between Sharon and Jacques, as they follow the White Phosphorous (WP) story. And earlier yesterday, I was touched by Sharon's Man versus man post, in which she captured so adeptly my own feelings of late, what with all the pent-up anger which rages in so many of us in the wake of the monstrous acts of the US and UK governments which are made all the more so by the apparent rationality which is called upon to strategize the perpetration of the acts and the subsequent attempts to justify the unjustifiable.

This is the anger which drives so many of us to share our thoughts publicly, in an attempt to dialogue as a means to find truth and justice in this world which is at once stunningly beautiful and horrendously pained. And, like Sharon, I often find it difficult to write or respond in some meaningful way to what seems a continual barrage of blackness. I used to cringe in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 at hearing Bush use a word, repeatedly, which I had thought was no longer taken seriously, at least by those of us who found relief in the Age of Enlightenment thinkers, a word which seemed until then medieval: evil.

Four years later, four years of observing that which seems to me to be evil if ever evil could be properly spoken of, and roughly four years, since, of formal studies in philosophy, which rightly or wrongly helped to instill in me a certain participation in the term's usage, I have at times and reluctantly been brought 'round to Bush's dark dichotomy in which there exists both an objective good and evil. But, I remain deeply sceptical of this simple formulation which, I believe, is used as a means to preclude meaningful thought and, thus, dissent.

And so with this anger which so often wells up within, and which as a result seems never far from my core being, I have tried to participate in the debate—long before entering the blogosphere fray—and to share thoughts and information which I hope will one day bring some measure of relief to those upon whom destruction has been, and is being, wrought in our names, as well as to those of us who watch on in disgust.

This brings me to the final point of this post, the sense of simultaneous sadness and understanding which I feel in watching Sharon and Jacques' debate unfold, a debate which to me seems to be largely one of semantics. As Sharon articulated well, scepticism is being torn in two in this exchange. Sharon's scepticism—if I may offer my own subjective analysis of another individual's thoughts—is one in search of truth.

She clearly doesn't doubt the abhorrent actions of the US's use of chemical weapons (a designation within which I will continue to include white phosphorous as it is being used by the US military no matter the legalistic distinctions which both the US and UK governments, and their complicit media, are knocking themselves out to forge as a techno-speak issue as a means to turn what is a no-brainer to most people into a jargon-laden debate decipherable only by so-called experts and media pundits). Sharon's scepticism is not a disbelief, nor doubt, that the US has used WP; rather, she is yet to be convinced that the burnt bodies within unburnt clothing were necessarily caused by the US's use of white phosphorous.

Jacques, on the other hand, needs no more convincing, and seems to think that we are in danger of demanding a level of proof which may, in the meantime, miss the larger, more immediate point that the US is killing and maiming people—military personnel, insurgent or civilian—in a most brutal fashion.

I am both saddened and heartened by this debate because I empathize with you both, and, indeed, think you're both right. I, like Jacques (and Sharon), require no more proof of the act and the perpetrator; indeed, these are now settled fact. Rather, we must focus our energies on collectively condemning such acts as reprehensible, in my view and in Jacques' words, regardless of whether the victim is "civilian or militant or soldier". But, in the meantime, Sharon's continued questioning remains valid given the present lack of demonstrable evidence (from the perspective of those of us who were not present at the scene) that the burnt bodies were, in fact, caused by the use of white phosphorous.

Let us try, as difficult as it sometimes is, not to get mired in the minutiae of communications; they are, by their very nature, inexact. Let us, instead, continue to respect one another, as I'm sure Sharon and Jacques do or they wouldn't invest the time to articulate their positions with such care, and to seek overlap rather than divisive distinctions. We're all in this together, and we need each other's support.

Thank you, Sharon, Jacques and the rest of you, for helping me to find my voice on, this, my 40th birthday.

In peace,

Sean