THOUGHT FOR TODAY

200 airline passengers sit for 12 hours in an aircraft on a tarmac waiting to be flown to Mexico.

It's snowing. There's ice on the wings of the aircraft.

No one attempts to unload the passengers or to move the aircraft back to the terminal.

The passengers sit and do nothing. For 12 hours.

A letter to the editor of the Wall Street Journal last week called the passengers "sheep" for sitting and doing nothing about their plight. There should have been wholesale rage until something was done, he said.

Being a nation of sheep strikes a nerve. How many years are we into the war in Iraq (didn't Bush address the nation long ago to announce that we had won the war and that it was over? That was American 2,500 deaths ago)? And we're just now questioning the administrations answers concerning what the hell it is we're doing over there. Shades of Viet Nam.

When it comes to killing, there should be no unquestioned answers.

Why can't we ever win a war? There hasn't been a war won by the USA since Korea.

Let's concede that we'll never be able to win a war and never go to war again.

Let's concede that diplomacy is the better medicine and that war never really has solved anything.

Is it going to take the detonation of a nuclear weapon by a Third World country for the United States to "get it"? The stakes in the 21st century are too high to be playing around with the game of war.

Has war solved anything in the Middle East? How many centuries have these factions been fighting? As they say, those who fail to learn from history are destined to repeat it.

Looks like the USA has not yet learned that all important lesson.

Time to start questioning all of the answers we are being given on the Iraq war.

Time to stop being a nation of sheep.