Nothing to fight for is worse than war

To the editor:

As a father whose son recently spent 10 months in Afghanistan fighting in the war on terror, I would like to respond to a recent letter claiming that President Bush's legacy should be "draft and debt."

My response is this quote by John Stewart Mills:

"War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

BARRY R. RANDOLPH, Cape Girardeau