This is a followup to a blog I posted Sunday regarding “rightness” being framed by relationship.  
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I was in High School during the first Gulf War.  My friends and I held some very strong opinions about the war and even blocked traffic on the main road through town, holding anti-war signs.  A decade later, I was afforded the opportunity to play songs for, speak to and spend time with soldiers in the US military in Western Europe along with their families.  I received emails of thanks from teenagers whose parents had been serving in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. Some of these kids’ parents had lost limbs. Some had lost their lives. Each of these kids was deeply proud of their parents and their service.

Later, I found myself standing with a guitar in front of the Army’s 120th Division in South Carolina, most of whom were about nineteen years old.  Many of them were headed to serve on battlefields somewhere in the world. Not all of them would come back.

I still hold strong opinions about US foreign policy. But those opinions have taken on a much more human shape since “war” became a much more human affair for me.  This doesn’t mean a compromise in my principles, per se.  It does mean that my opinions have undergone a process of refinement, mainly because I more regularly find myself in the soup with people holding other and contrary opinions, many of whom I have deep respect for.  I can be (and am) a staunch supporter of the U.S. Armed services. I am also a responsible critic of much American Foreign Policy.  Holding my opinions is not as simple as it used to be nor is it as fulfilling to simply revel in those opinions.

My opinions about human affairs (and they are all human affairs), if they carry any weight, change the way I live. What I think about war or economics or sexual identity means I live differently in those areas, which means I will either enrich or impoverish my world depending on the accuracy and “rightness” of my opinion and the strength of my social network.

In Josh Ritter’s “Girl In The War” he writes a fictional dialogue between the Apostles Paul and Peter, reading in part… 

“Peter said to Paul you know all those words we wrote 
Are just the rules of the game and the rules are the first to go 
But now talking to God is Laurel begging Hardy for a gun 
got a girl in the war man I wonder what it is we done”

Paul said to Peter “You got to rock yourself a little harder 
Pretend the dove from above is a dragon and your feet are on fire.”   
“But I got a girl in the war Paul the only thing I know to do
Is turn up the music and pray that she makes it through.”

I love this. Paul stresses the deep in importance of “the game” (dragons and fire) while Peter likens it to “a war” involving someone he loves.  Setting rules to a game is one thing; playing that game is means people are actually involved, which often comes at the cost of rules being bent or even broken.  But the stuff of life is generally too important (and far too complicated) to be subject to dumbed down.  If I allow my opinions to subject to reductionism, the life I live will reflect that reductionism… and I don’t want a small, safe life.