Sharp Blades

Red State, Blue State: Hometown News by Meteor Blades - Thu Oct 14th, 2004 at 23:09:34 GMT In between my unfettered rage at the ideologues who lied us into the Iraq war and my cautious elation that we may elect someone who brings an end to that nightmare, I sometimes catch myself going numb. The statistics are numbing. Perhaps 25,000 people dead, most of them civilians. Perhaps 100,000 wounded, many of them maimed forever. Who knows how many tens of thousands of insurgents recruited, not only in Iraq but also around the planet. And all because of the machinations of some war criminals – sorry, no other description will do – who hijacked our patriotism, grief and anger in the service of a foul crusade that they mask with “liberty” and “democracy.” In their mouths, these are simultaneously trigger words, soporific words, numbing words. Yet every day, sometimes twice or three times a day, for the past 19 months, somewhere in America, a dead soldier or Marine is memorialized by her or his family. Whatever appears on the surface of the bereaved at these rituals, beneath they are anything except numb. In the national media, we occasionally hear one of these stories, but mostly what we get – if anything at all – are the statistics. If only the personal stories in the local media – even the merged, oligopolistic chains that now pass for most local media – if only one of these stories made front-page news in The New York Times or the lead item on ABC - and if it were combined with an equivalent story about an Iraqi family at the burying grounds - numb would never describe us.