i waited until this thread had been pushed off the TPM front page roll to respond. this stream is liable to take a walk of the wild-side, and is not appropriate for the casual TPM reader, but i sense you can hang...

i have some difficulty sensing where the battle lines lie in debates about Israel and the occupied territories (i am aware that this is an antiquated phrase, but also believe it carries validity), and for this reason i do not often comment in threads about it. if some future comment of mine on this topic strikes you as being excessively harsh towards Israel, understand that as an American, i hold My Nation's actions to a much higher standard than I do the rest of the world, and i hold our allies to at least honestly attempting to walk upon the higher ground. a nation that uses as its referent standard to judge propriety in its waging war, the acts of its enemy, has defeated itself from within. Arafat was an evil man, whose lack of honour is self-evident from his long life. someone who asserts a right to resist the dominant power, sending other people's children, siblings and spouses filled with suicidal intents out to target non-combatants, that lives past the age of 30 is a preponderate hypocrite. if the Palestinians had properly applied the lessons of Gandhi, this would have ended long ago at a substantially smaller cost in human life and suffering. i have also come to view Sharon as just the flip-side of the same evil coin of the realm that Arafat's head in stamped upon. you cannot forcibly remove a people from land they are chained to by a millennial bond of ancestry to those buried in the community's graveyard, and not expect them to resist with violence. would you or i do otherwise with far shorter ties to the past? a people inexorably pushed into smaller and smaller enclaves will never be pacified, and will at some point respond as caged animals. to sow these seeds straight into the abyss' howling wind is to assure a harvest of whirlwinds. i don't have answers, but can see this is a never-ending loop of an eye for any eye, and will only end badly, with all who are within becoming piteously blind, hopelessly groping for a path leading them out of their muddy ditch reality.

hesitancy was not what made my MJR post difficult. the difficulty was from contemplation of war, and not wanting to awaken demons of my own creation that spread the war sickness. it is malarial in nature, never cured, but can be laid dormant for long periods of time. i am affected lightly in comparison to most others, and believe this is because i never consciously willed to end another human's life with an overt act. i am adverse using PTSD to describe the war sickness, because it is not manifest from a disorder. it is direct proof that a person has survived war still in possession of their humanity.

it is possible to be guilty, yet not blameworthy, and i would love to thump the head of the person who coined the phrase, "survivor guilt". i realise that it was created in an effort to help people, whose reaction to past experiences has made them dysfunctional in the present. yet on this charge, i freely admit guilt, as i survived, while others including two friends did not. i am guilty for being mortal, for being blind to even the near future, for being incapable of selling my soul to a extra-human power for just one change in the past. in all of this, there is no blame, but still, i survive

I survive
You can try but you can't deny me
I survive
Like a lie that just won't die
I survive

"Survive" - Dope