On The Recent Fort Hood Shooting

Fort Hood Shooting - Death In The Afternoon - Esquire

...The terrible combination of factors that led to yesterday's events is going to take weeks, if not months, to unravel, but it seems as though this is a case of workplace violence at a very unique workplace that already was struck by workplace violence in 2009. It is not to stigmatize veterans to observe that the soldier in question may have been influenced by his time in a war of dubious origins and mendacious purpose. It is to point out that wars should not be launched idly, or on false pretenses, or for reasons other than the ones that are publicly stated at the time of their launching. Those are the wars that never really end, that go on and on, wounding the people who fought them, and the country, with decades of gratuitous heartbreak. Those are the real politics -- national and personal -- behind these events. This may well turn out to be the result of wounds that were concealed, and not weapons that were not.