I was taking the bus home a couple of days ago and listening to NPR’s Talk of the Nation podcast from earlier in the week. The topic of that show was about the 4000 American lives that have been lost due to the Iraq war. People were asked to call in to talk about someone that they knew who had died, so that, for the smallest of fragments of time, we could get to know who some of these men and women were. The topic was clearly a supremely sad one, and I started tearing up when a man named Bill started choking up right away as he began to introduce his son Patrick, who would have been one year older than me had he not been killed in 2006:

I just think that were there any justice in this world, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the other serial killer(s) that they surround them with would have climbed the gallows right after Saddam because they’re all cut from the same cloth. For what these people have done to our nation, these draft-deserters and chicken hawks that did not serve, is inexcusable.

He said he was filled with rage at how the war was managed, and of course I am one of an ocean of outsiders who agree. But I came to that conclusion a long time ago from a position too comfortably removed from the grief and pain into which people like Bill have been thrown. Hearing these people call in and speak of their nephews and sons and husbands and friends in a way that made me want to meet them was a tear-inducing experience. So sad, such a waste, such a crime.

And it put things into perspective for me. Why wallow in trivial matters of heartbreak, cheating, disloyalty, frustration, idleness, confusion when I get to wake up every morning and still have everything and everyone that is important to me a phone call or a taxi ride away? In the face of true grief and wrenching pain, the stuff that all of us hope we never have to go through, the things that truly matter are illuminated. Sometimes all we need is just a little perspective to find that will to be happy again.

We’re all lucky bastards.