Liz and I were watching the news. The story was about preemptive reduction of cruising in the streets of Milwaukee--stopping it before anything bad actually happens. A police officer intoned seriously into the off-screen microphone, "The problem with cruising is that it leads to stopping."

We looked at each other and burst out laughing. That's sort of like saying, "The problem with life is that it leads to death." It's true, I guess, but what can you do with a comment like that?

 Speaking of death, an Associated Press story being widely disseminated is Soldier son of Dutch defense chief killed (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline). Lieutenant Dennis van Uhm was the victim of a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Dutch prime minister Jan Peter Balkenende characterized this loss as "an unprecedented tragedy."

Well, no. It's a very "precedented" tragedy. Van Uhm is the 16th soldier from the Netherlands to die there. Nearly 500 American soldiers have died in Afghanistan, and the death toll for soldiers from the West there is nearly 800--and continuing to rise. In Iraq, 4,000 US soldier deaths have preceded the next one. And the one after that. In war, tragedy is the coin of the realm.

Since my mother's death a couple weeks ago, I've had a harder time than usual listening to pious rhetoric and words that sound like they mean more than they do. Maybe if I'd lost a soldier son, I'd feel differently about the inflated language used to turn a personal loss into a political lever. I'm glad not to know the truth that would come from that experience.