I don’t talk about my brother very much, mostly because we don’t have very much in common. In short:
My brother is a Marine, currently stationed in Afghanistan, with a home, wife, and dogs (I think three) in Arizona. I’m a comparatively yuppie college kid studying music in the Pacific Northwest.
He likes music that a lot of normal people his age like, ie Sublime, mainstream rock, country, hip-hop, etc. I think. I haven’t talked to him about music in awhile. I like music that’s often bizarre for the sake of being bizarre.
My brother likes big trucks driving around in the mud and going really fast. I like wimpy little hybrid cars that can do little more than get around town (if any I have to like any cars at all).
My brother’s in the military. I’m essentially a pacifist.
Even on the psychological level, I’m really introverted and passive, while my brother is definitely extroverted and active.
Other than the fact that we are brothers, we look like brothers, and our voices sound the same over the phone (which my grandma never fails to mention when I talk to her), it’s hard to find anything in common between my brother and me. But our parents are the same, we grew up together; we are family. Still, I rarely talk to him anymore, not because I don’t care about him, but because I’m caught up in my own little world, and I figure he’s caught up in his own little world, and I figure we won’t have much to talk about anyways, and we won’t really see eye-to-eye on much.
I don’t really know where I’m going with this. Maybe I don’t appreciate my family enough. Maybe I don’t really “get” family. Probably both. But no, I do appreciate my family; I’m just very bad at showing my appreciation. Whenever anyone else talks about their family and how close they are, my mind is boggled a little bit. I can’t imagine actually being “close” to my family, mostly because my dad is so alienating and my extended family is even more different than the way I even think.
Family in general is just something of an anomaly to me, which is probably one of the many reasons I have absolutely no desire to have one. Why don’t I understand it? How did I end up this way, when my dad often expresses how family is “numero uno”? My dad is such a strange person, and I doubt I’ll ever actually understand him. Likewise, I doubt he’ll ever actually understand me.
Ugh. Life. I can’t wrap my mind around it. Hence, I throw these thoughts out the window and just try to make the most of it on my own.
Anyways, back to my original purpose for writing this, I think: my brother, Carl, is in Afghanistan, where people kill one another over religious and nationalist and tribal bullshit. I can’t imagine what it’s like knowing that a group of people outside my bed want to kill me and everyone around me. He chose this life, yes, but no one should have to experience that. War is absolute crap. Yes, I “support our troops,” because I want them to come home where they belong, my brother included. You don’t have to support “missions” and wars to be patriotic.
I love America. There are many worse places. But I’ll be damned if this place couldn’t be better, starting with our leaders’ general gung-ho attitude about our place in this world.
Is war ever truly necessary? Of course. That’s the one thing I can’t stand about it. World War II. How many more lives would have ended if we didn’t fight back? How many lives ended because we fought back? What if we’d never needed to fight back? What if we’d fought back earlier? Would our view of the war be different? I don’t know. It scares me that we have the capability now to end all life on this planet in an instance, and I really, really hope we, as a species, don’t put that capability to use.
In other words: cherish your life, cherish your loved ones, cherish the people that you don’t really like at all. You never know when they’ll be gone. Be thankful for what you have. Happy early Independence Day.
--Jon
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