Yesterday a close friend of mine told me that a young woman, a friend of his, had telephoned to tell him that her brother had just been killed in action in Afghanistan. On hearing this, I felt an overwhelming sense of tragedy at a young life gone.<\/p>\n
The war is so abstract for most of us, something we’ve been reading about in newspapers for so many years now that for many it has taken on a surreal quality. And yet people die. They die day after day after day, and every once in a while we have a personal connection to one of those people.<\/p>\n
I know that we all have different politics, different opinions about the meaning of the war, its goals, its methods. But I think we all can agree that whatever other meanings there are here, that the loss of a young person – with their unique thoughts and hopes and dreams for the future, all now gone forever – is an event of overwhelming sadness.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday a close friend of mine told me that a young woman, a friend of his, had telephoned to tell him that her brother had just been killed in action in Afghanistan. On hearing this, I felt an overwhelming sense of tragedy at a young life gone. The war is so abstract for most of … Continue reading “Gone”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1972"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1973,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1972\/revisions\/1973"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}