What was your favorite image in this piece?
What could be added to make this longer?

(Click the post title to read the submission.)

This book was written in response to George Bush’s war. The waste, the carnage, the meaningless death was too overwhelming to quietly ignore. On the front page of our hometown paper, the picture of a kid who went to school with my kids. Dead now from Bush’s war. And what can you do about it. How do you make a country, a planet, understand that stupid death in stupid war has no purpose, no reason for this to happen. To make people understand that when we wave flags and speeches about fuck-head nationalism, what it means is that nineteen-year old kids will die with a gun in their hands, and that five-year old kids will be killed in the cross fire. With no accountability for the people who started this insane war and the fucking morons who did nothing to stop it. They have blood on their hands, all of them, the blood of children who cry out for someone to stand up for them, to speak for them, to tear down this insane system and build something better.

Obviously, Mikael is passionate about his theme, and what is equally obvious when one reads his excerpt it how skillfully he manages to compress such heartfelt emotion with his deft description and convincing detail. He avoids the pifall of authorial intrusion and lets the story tell itself, an art T.S. Eliot would call “negative capability.”