WAR

I have just discovered that radio is more vivid and challenging than TV, particularly non-news programs like interviews and literary readings. If you were listening, it reaches directly into your brain . Outer ear, middle ear, inner ear, and then the brain. The brain would reassemble a picture, a pattern. When you watch TV, the picture (pattern) is predetermined, you do not think, you are passive. The picture is poured into your brain, it becomes the pattern for what you would later hear. If a picture occupies a space first, any information entering the brain later would have to conform to it! If it does not, it becomes a second class pattern, or maybe a lie or propaganda.

In the past week I have listed to two programs that were very inspiring. A short story by Tom Bissell "War Wound". It brings back Vietnam, a writer and his father, a Vietnam Marine, revisiting. I see it as an intro to the wounds returning from Iraq, how they happened, and how to treat them. At some point the father says "when I came here, we were like crusaders. We were going to help people, make their lives better, give them democracy."

The second story was an interview with an Iraq veteran living in his car! Yes in his car. It was so painful that I could not hold my tears. A soldier is as human as anyone of us. Pictures of children that he played with in Iraq keep him going and maintain his sanity. Please listen to it and comment.