Idea, photo by docksidepress.

The tragedy of war is that it uses man’s best to do man’s worst.
~Henry Fosdick

As oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico, is is racking up an incalculable debt, one that all of us will have to pay. Place it on top of the barely calculable debt for the stimulus package, add it to the still growing debt for the ongoing wars in Afganistan and the Middle East and fold it into our apparently untameable national debt. Feel that number, and everything else those dollars could have been spent on.

Now pile on the cost of the life that will be lost in the Gulf of Mexico as rampant oil invades teeming fisheries, vibrant beaches and lush and renewing marshes. Add the toll to the lives and livelihoods of the residents of Florida, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Mexico and the Caribbean. Don’t forget the people whose medical and other assistance monies have probably been spent on a bank that was too big to fail either.

And on Memorial Day and every day, don’t ever, ever forget the men and women whose lives have been cut short by war, who never came home and made the unknowable differences in their communities and families that their unbroken lives would undoubtedly have made.

When I weigh all that in my heart, it seems obvious to me that war is a cancer on our world. We can’t afford its cost if we are to have any hope of saving our fragile Earth, our families and friends and fellow citizens, and our brothers and sisters in all nations.

View this bigger in Matt’s slideshow.

More Michigan Memorial Day at Absolute Michigan.