Glenn's blog

Family is an interesting thing. I mean the family we are born into – the family we don't choose. Our spouses, significant others, and even extended non-traditional families are built up through choice.

But family, family we just get. We are born and then we've got parents and siblings and aunts and uncles, cousins, grandparents, and so on. Sometimes we like them, sometimes we agree on things, and sometimes we even get along. A whole of the time, though, we disagree and dislike each other.

Or maybe this is just my particular family.

I'm thinking in particular of my brother, who is in Afghanistan right now, as a member of the US military. We're just 16 months apart in age, although our birthdays put me 2 years ahead in school.

While he is a soldier, I am pretty close to being a pacifist. He eats meat, and I am vegan. I am an animal rights activist, and he is not an activist at all. He is a devoted and caring father, while I have sworn to not have children because I think that overpopulation is a huge and pressing problem. He keeps his dog tied (a habit he learned from our father) while I rescued a rabbit from his house.

How do I reconcile our differences? I don't. To be quite honest, if he weren't family I probably wouldn't even know him.

But still, he is family, and we are connected somehow. It might just be a cultural thing that it feels like family is to be cherished.

While I am morally opposed to war and violence, especially our involvement in the middle east, I have a real respect for his sense of duty. He is doing his second year away from his family out of a sense of duty.

There's something almost Heideggerian about taking hold of a purpose and acting on that purpose. A real authenticity to being a person who believes in something and acts on that belief, even if (and especially if) it means putting your own life in danger. We're probably a lot alike in that sense. We both feel strongly and have a deep sense of meaning in what we do. His, though, has led him to a far more dangerous place than my sense of purpose. I have to have respect for that.

Maybe family can help us to experience people who we wouldn't normally associate with. It's like a lesson in compassion and appreciation, a lesson in looking beyond the differences and finding the common ground. There is always common ground, if we look hard enough.