Tally marks
March 20, 2008Has it already been 5 years?
Apparently, it has.
And almost 90000 documented civilian casualties. Documented casualties. There’s something chillingly bureaucratic about that term. It means 90000 times, someone, somewhere, added a little tally mark under the header of “civilian casualties”. But behind each of those tally marks, behind each of those few molecules of ink, there’s a person, a human being. A man or woman, boy or girl, with a history, a story to tell, friends, relatives, hopes, fears, dreams.
It all seems so far away. Did you know that the amount of genetic variation between all of mankind, between all of its members, is smaller than the genetic differences between one troop of chimpanzees? This means that for all intents and purposes, those 90000 men and women are not strangers, they are not mere tally marks somewhere in a dusty office without a corner view. No, they are relatives, closer to you and me than most people are willing to admit.
I hope none of us can sleep tonight. We are all responsible for all the people in the world, and these 90000 tally marks should haunt you tonight. Like 900000 nails on a chalkboard.
Well, that’s what you get when *some* Americans are voting with their pockets and not with their heads. If all these “young, poor, uneducated” Americans where to do the “lowly” jobs that Mexicans do in this country, they wouldn’t have signed up for the US army, US would be out of enough troops, and the war would have never started in the first place. But instead of getting a job, they decided to become mercenaries cause it pays better, and the danger is minimal (less than 3,000 US troops died so far in the whole war). All this, at the cost of thousands of innocent people’s lives, of course.
This is as much as Rumsfield/Cheney/Bush’s fault, as it is every US troop’s who joined that army for this war. Their fault is bigger than simply voting for Bush twice, because they knew where they were going towards when joining the army at these times. This is why I hate bumper stickers that say “support our troops, not the war” and other such laughable, self-conflicting, statements.
Comment by Eugenia — March 21, 2008 @ 12:18 am
I thought the same thing when I heard that on CBS news a few nights ago. We have killed some ninety thousand people, every one with a favorite movie, a phone number. Each with a lifetime of experiences, and things they were proud of about themselves, and things that were important to them–things that made them special. Tragedy isn’t a strong enough word to describe the death of any one of those people, at least not to anyone they really cared about, whose lives will forever be less worth living. I’ve experienced a very close death. It’s awful, life-changing. I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy, and we’ve done it to hundreds of thousands of people. It takes some effort to break past the learned apathy, but wow, compared to America, Al-Qaeda is a model for peace. We do more “terrorism” to the middle east in a month than it has ever done to us.
Comment by Alex Forster — March 21, 2008 @ 7:58 am
Well Eugenia, Bush was not voted into office by a majority in 2000, since as we all know those elections were stolen. They were probably manipulated again in 2004 (see Ohio, for example).
Comment by herman — March 21, 2008 @ 1:49 pm
The evil genius of this war was not instituting the draft. As long as Americans are isolated from the consequences of its elected leaders militaristic fetishes, overseas adventures, and so on, nothing will change. 90,000 actual deaths thousands of miles away is less than the number that you’d see in a disaster movie coming out of Hollywood, and they have about the same metaphysical punch. It is only meditating on the reality of this - what you did in your post, and others have done in the comments above - that reconnects us with reality.
Dehumanization this time isn’t so much the result of propaganda, but a result of the simulative way we experience reality. I’ve often said that everything you need to know about what is wrong with the United States can be found in Las Vegas, and the way it offers up pure simulation as entertainment. I don’t believe that violent video games, for example, cause people to be violent, but I believe it is symptomatic of the detached way we prefer / have chosen, to experience reality. People who think hard about these things can keep simulation separated from reality but I am not so sure everyone can.
The one time the reality of violence did hit home was on September 11th, and you saw how much the localized / non-simulated violence freaked out an entire country. Until these wars come home, I am afraid this just isn’t going to stop.
I meditate upon death daily. I do this not because I am a nihilist or a goth or something, but because only in fully understanding that life is finite beyond an abstraction, can I truly appreciate life, the minutes with my family and people I love.
The easy thing is to hate our leaders (which I do), and loathe the minority here which has made this war and others like it possible (which I also do). The hard thing is to find a way to disentangle us from this concept of distant, alienated wars and relate it to how we feel about our mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and spouses, and connect that to the reality of what it would be like if they were to suddenly die at the hands of a smart bomb and some rich white guy’s little chess game. I have never believed that showing gory pictures of violence (from the war) on the news is “sensationalistic,” or somehow unfair. That is reality. You have to be able to see a little girl crying because her parents were just killed by a bomb, and still support this war, to have any credibility with me. This isn’t risk. It isn’t a video game.
I encourage the governments of Europe to continue putting out arrest warrants on our leaders. I encourage things like international tribunals, and this is hard for me, but there must be accountability - a price to pay, for the lies and violence committed by the administration of the United States government. If there aren’t enough people in the United States to bring these people to accountability, anything that can be done internationally is fine by me.
I am not a pacifist; and as the bible and song put it, to everything there is a season, a time to kill, sometimes, but these seasons ought to be far more rare, and in far more dire circumstances, than our leaders seem to think.
We must pursue, in the United States, a foreign policy whereby we respond with violence only when our territorial integrity (meaning the 50 states and our territories) is violated, or, in peacekeeping missions under limited circumstances (genocide, etc.) only under a truly international banner (and not in name only, as these “international coalitions” go.)
This is an unpopular position in the United States (it gets you tagged as an “isolationist”), but I believe that, as Billy Bragg put it so well in his particularly insightful song, “Help Save the Youth of America,” that “you can fight for Democracy at home, and not in some foreign land.” Indeed now, with the Orwellian excesses of terrorist watch lists, the Department of Homeland Security, and so on, this is true more than ever.
We have work to do, and something needs to supplant the goofiness of the Left in the United States with a resistance movement that can bring results. No more impotent, ineffective protest marches, die ins, etc. We need to find a way to make war unprofitable.
Comment by Quag7 — March 21, 2008 @ 4:40 pm
I hope everyone here realizes that the fast majority of those casualties are Muslim killing Muslims.
Comment by Adin Aronson — March 27, 2008 @ 3:41 pm