Sophocles says it's a war when...

It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job. It's a depression when you do.

It's a bug when your neighbor catches a cold. It's the flu when you do.

It's profit taking when stocks you don't own decline. It's a crash when your stocks decline.

It's terrorism when foreigners kill us. It's collateral damage when we kill foreigners.

It's putting down the last throes of an insurgency when kids from Missouri, Iowa and Kansas are getting maimed and killed. It's a War when the ABC news anchor gets maimed.



The older I get the more often I think to myself, there but for the grace of God go I.

I see Jim Cramer doing his carnival barker/stock broker thing on TV and I think it.

I see home owners starting at what once was their home and I think it.

I see some political shill on TV selling a program in which they clearly don't believe and I think it.

I see an American soldier home in a wheel chair and I think it.

I see a dead Iraqi insurgent and I think it.

I see mothers and fathers crying over children dead and maimed because they are viewed as nothing more than pawns on a chess board and I think it.

It's too bad that Freud buried alternates views of Sophocles' Oedipus Rex under a mountain of his peculiar brand of psycho-sexual babble. Thus the Oedipus Complex became a perverse desire instead of, among many other possible interpretations, an inability to see one's self in all men and one's nation in all nations.

The closing lines:

CREON. Thou must not think
To have thy way in all things all thy life.
Thou hadst it once, yet went it ill with thee.

CHORUS Ye men of Thebes, behold this Œdipus,
Who knew the famous riddle and was noblest,
Who envied no one’s fortune and success.
And, lo,! in what a sea of direst woe
He now is plunged. From hence the lesson draw,
To reckon no man happy till ye see
The closing day; until he pass the bourn
Which severs life from death, unscathed by woe.