West Nile Virus

Leonardo da Vinci once famously said :  "War is the ultimate madness." Watching the reports on the West Nile crisis in especially Texas, particularly the Dallas- Fort Worth area, feels a bit surreal, because my only surviving sibling, a brother, lives there. We no longer stay in contact, and it is strange to see the images of the planes flying over the area dumping chemicals to kill the deadly virus carrying mosquitoes. I  cannot ask him if he and his children are all right. I cannot ask him what it feels like to deal with something like that. I cannot tell him it worries me to see those images, on top of the horrible drought Texas is also dealing with. I cannot. Because our family had a war that tore everyone apart, like a war would with bombs, our relationships were destroyed, and the bridge that allowed for the free flow of communication was destroyed. Leonardo da Vinci knew about war, he was around it enough. He knew it to be the "ultimate madness". It certainly was for our family, because it is madness that I cannot talk anymore to my brother, even when it is important. War, big or small, distorts everything. What once was normal, natural ,  becomes numb, dumb, cold, twisted, and ultimately, just dies. My brother is 54 now, and maybe, at this rate, I will never see him again. I'll just find out , maybe, that one day, he died. Just like in a war, where people find out sometimes years later, what happened to their family. Family is everything, when you treat each other right. When you don't, it quickly becomes a nightmare, a quicksand of broken dreams and despair. A war zone.