Submitted by Robert Leibold, Mar 3, 2008 10:45

My father was an American veteran of the war, and though he died in 1994 still deeply troubled by his role in the conflict, and the terrible consequences of this greatest of international epochs, he had long before forgiven former enemies--and he did so publicly, unconditionally, with a magnanimity and finality perhaps shared by countless millions of veterans today.

Those who didn't participate in the war are not in a position by which we might negatively judge men like Grass, indeed particularly if millions of men like my father had already provided reconciliation. For in fact if the men who fought the war have at last found their peace, who are we to stir the embers?

For all their faults, for all their trials and tribulations in this life, Grass and his generation are by no means as vindictive, dysfunctional, and embittered as our own: And I'll go to my own grave with infinitely more faith in men like Grass than in the cossetted, egotistic men and women of my own generation who're blithely and catastrophically mismanaging our world to the very threshhold of Armageddon.

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