Of all the people in this world qualified to write about Kosovo, I am in the bottom tier, possibly ahead of Monica Lewinsky, but not by much. I really did try to write about something else, but this kept coming back. Don't expect anything profound -- in its own way, it's just another whine.

I don't know much about war, although that hasn't stopped me from speaking my mind about it. I was 22 years old when I marched on Washington in November of 1969. I'd gone with some friends, starting out Friday night in a Volkswagen bus after the football game at the school where I was teaching. We crashed in somebody's American University dorm room (I could sleep on the floor in those days) and the next day joined others of my generation outside the White House, singing, chanting, listening to speeches. The next day I read that there were more people at the Ohio State football game than were at the protest. The newspaper seemed to think that was significant.

In truth, my opposition to the war was entirely philosophical, based on the feeling (as an Intuitive Feeler I'm off the Myers-Briggs scale) that all men are brothers and violence is no solution to our problems. But my circle of male friends was made up almost entirely of young men with solid 2S deferments. I didn't have much emotional attachment to anyone who was actually fighting in Vietnam.

Things were different in the Gulf War. A young man whom I had come to regard as a virtual son had joined the Marine Corps upon his graduation from the school where I taught. He was sent to the area about two months before the first air strikes. I worried for him, but believed he was safe on some "decoy" detail on a ship in the harbor. Only when he returned did I come to understand how much danger he'd been in, how close we came to losing him. American troops were sent to Bosnia just after he left the Corps, and I remember feeling uneasy with myself for watching the news reports and thinking, not my kid.

Now the uneasy feeling is back. It was a picture like this that got my attention on Saturday evening's NBC News. (This picture is from The New York Times. I have appropriated it entirely without permission, but I didn't know how else to make the point.) The young woman, wrapped in a blanket, sits in a muddy field near the Macedonian border. In all likelihood she is holding (or wearing) every material possession she has left in the world. Probably the people who surround her are strangers. She has been forced from her home, and has nowhere to go.

It brought to mind this picture, scarfed from Newsweek.  The scene is Woodstock, August 1969. (The girl with her hand up to her chin standing behind the central figure looks so much like me that I sometimes tell people it is. It's not, but it could have been.) The event was advertised as "three days of peace, love and music." Well, there was that, but there was also rain, bugs, and no real bathrooms. It's the kind of shared misery that you romanticize as the years go by, that you sigh for every time you see a Volkswagen bus.

I have a friend who often alludes to the fact that we grew up in a world of privilege and continue to live there -- we're white, college educated, inheritors of wealth our parents built. Such reminders irritate me sometimes, probably because I know he's right. To be who I am means that if I stand in a muddy field in the rain wrapped in a blanket, it's because I want to.

There's no one whose life does not include problems, challenges, even from time to time nearly unbearable pain. Maybe you're not wealthy, or employed, or entirely happy in your marriage. But if you're reading this, it means that you have an ISP account and the leisure to be looking at a page like this. Survey your circumstances tonight, and thank whatever god, force, or fate you believe in for the joy and the beauty that are there. And think of the brave brave people of Kosovo, and ask that same force to be with them. I know I will.