I finished Chris Hedges's War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning last Sunday. I had been waiting for this crazy week to end so that I could post something meanngful about this book, but I'm having one of those unproductive Saturday mornings. In lieu of my meaningful post, I'd like to leave you with this quote:

As long as we think abstractly, as long as we find patriotism and the exuberance of war our fulfillment, we will never understand those who do battle against us, or how we are perceived by them, or finally those who do battle for us and how we should respond to it all. We will never discover who we are. We will fail to confront the capacity we all have for violence. And we will court our own extermination. By excepting the facile cliche that the battle under way against terrorism is a battle against evil, by easily branding those who fight us as the barbarians, we, like them, refuse to ackowledge our own culpability. We ignore real injustices that have led many of those arrayed against us to their rage and despair.

If I could, I would assign reading this book to all Americans.