All Smiles

All Smiles, originally uploaded by lucienphoto.

Families are strange configurations. We strive to be part of one and simultaneously seek to divide and separate out. We laugh with our families and then we laugh at them. We complain that they are too little of this and too much of that. We praise their great work/family ethic and then whine about the way they choose to live out their lives. We include and exclude. We talk behind their backs and will not share our feelings to their faces. We all belong to one and we have all some if not all of the acts listed above.

Families are everything and nothing. They are the beginning and end of many people's problems. They are our alpha and our omegas. Families make you laugh and they also make you cry. We live in them even when we do not want to. We die as part of one even when we are not wanted. We sacrifice for families, too.

It is Thanksgiving 2009. I am a natural born US citizen. I have lived under the tutelage of what we think of as "Our Greatest Generation" . They survived World War II, the Korean Conflict, the Cuban Missle Crisis and the the Bay of Pigs, the Vietnam War, The Gulf War, the invasions of Grenada and some have lived long enough to experience both the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They have seen facism, totaltarianism, communism, socialsim, and fundamentalism, and extreme idealism as motivations for war.

Families and war have these unquantifiable abstract associations. I still do not comprehend what makes people kill each other for an idea and I do not comprehend family systems at all.