The famous New Yorker cover on this very point . 

I think you've been missing my point, Jan. That's what I do.  As I said in my post to Mary - I avoid the news whenever possible and I advised her to do the same.  She worries about not keeping abreast with current events - but you can't help but hear about things whether you wish to or not, I find.

Feeling impotent and despairing doesn't feel indulgent to me.  It feels horrible.  Feeling indulgent is when I put it all out of my mind and do what I want to do instead.

xxx

I'm here! I was out this morning (nothing interesting). Thank you for your lovely posts. I definitely feel better than yesterday - more sleep helped - but I'm still not exactly dancing around with happiness.

For a long time I thought something could be done about war - that somehow if we all kept pointing out how wrong it was, and how little good it did, people would take some notice. It was about the time of the Falklands that I realised that war had always been with us, and always would be. That loss of idealism was a hopeless feeling.

Thanks to Chafing Dish for that beautiful poem, too.

War is certainly a horrific thing, but simply apprehending that does not tell us much about what can be done. Some people in the world have no option but to take up arms, because they are at the receiving end of oppressive military force (some of those in Palestine or Iraq would be an obvious example). To organize, campaign against exploitative wars that are being fought to serve imperial and economic interests of the major powers is what is necessary. Those wars are not inevitable - only the propaganda makes them out to be as such. The Falklands war was about nothing more than maintaining late imperial pride and keeping control over an island perhaps of some strategic importance. The war wouldn't have happened if there was a clear majority of British opinion opposing it - alas, the propaganda won the upper hand in that case. That propaganda itself needs to be fought at all opportunities.

Wasn't the Falklands war - or rather the excuse made in order to justify it at the time - supposed to be that a majority of the islanders themselves wanted to the islands to remain part of the British set-up? Now, even if that were indeed so, I'm not suggesting that it was necessarily a correct stance on their part; why on earth Britain would have wanted to retain this tiny territory that is so far from it yet so near to Argentina geographically I have less than no idea. Was (and are) those islands of genuine "strategic importance"? - and, if so, how much and what? I'm none too sure on that. Either way, I would find it hard to imagine any "strategic importance" of those islands actually manifesting itself, but I suppose I could be wrong about that; it's just that their history in the years leading up to and away from that war seem not to suggest it and, were it not for the islanders themselves, I cannot even see why Britain would have wanted to fight over them other than as a rather pathetic exercise in military bravado in the supposed (and somewhat haplessly unconvincing) service, as Ian rightly puts it, of "late imperial pride"....

That said, there's a similar argument that could, one may suppose, be put up for the peoples of Ireland, where the part still "belonging" to Britain ought to be capable of re-unification with the remainder without the need for bloodshed, were it not for the fact that (at present, anyway) the majority of the people of what we quaintly call "Northern Ireland" don't want this either.

I cannot say for certain that there was a "clear majority of British opinion opposing" the war in Iraq, but despite a very strong swathe of opinion against it, it went ahead; call me a political cynic if you will (and you'd neither be wrong nor cause offence in so doing), but that is just one of many instances which illustrate why I'd be wary of trusting any British government to honour the wishes of the majority of its electorate.

Best,

Alistair

Commiserations, hh. You sort of hinted at that. Not at all easy, but it may work out...
The geographical distance cannot have helped, I guess.

We all have our wounds, hh. After a while it will not be painful. You only want to be with people that love you and there is no point to hold on to the relationship if there is no understanding.

The most important thing is to love yourself and to know that you have special relationship with yourself and not to be hard on yourself.
We all here love you and wish to be help.