Quote of the Day - 3 August

Lots of reminders in the news today of the state of the world...

Fidel Castro is in hospital, Israel and Hezbollah no where near peace, the war in Iraq continues on. Maybe the only good news is that Somalia/Ethiopia/Sudan might be welcoming some peace but would one be wise to think the end of misery there is in sight?

How, as a US citizen, is one to spread concern, attention and a very wealthy voice to all these places of suffering? One school of thought is how broken we are here in the US and why should our voices travel out of America and into the world? We have state-sponsored poverty here (it's called welfare), recreational murder.. How awful is it to even consider that the slaughter of a life in northern Africa is more justifiable than it is in Miami? It's a freakish balance, isn't it? The loss of life resultant of a recreational murder (car jacking, drive-by, robbery, drug high) is profound in its random and arbitrary execution. The murder is completely unjustifiable in the sickest of minds. But you go to Sudan/Ethiopia/Somalia, or Israel and murder is with cause and with conviction. That does not make it right, but it reduces the sanctity of their lives. Because there are so many who have died for a common denominator, with cause and forethought. If you think for one second that I'm comparing the value of one life over another, or saying there is justified murder, then you've missed my point entirely. I'm trying to imagine this from the point of view of the people involved. It's easy to do. When we hear of the Iraqi casualties, do you not find yourself thinking they are merely collateral damage? Have you ever thought of our soldiers as merely collateral damage? When an Iraqi dies at the hand of an American, it's war and the price for freedom. When an American dies at the hand of an Iraqi, the murder is personal, intimate and senseless. We will mourn the death of a journalist, crushed by a bomb in a Baghdad hotel and put out a series of memoirs honoring their life and courage.

The death of a mother, who wakes and sleeps protecting her children, enduring years of violence and instability dies in the wake of the same bomb and her life is not celebrated. Her life is rounded off in the estimated numbers of casualties.

I don't know how we pick, as citizens, voters and leaders, what we fight for and what we don't. But we've been in the business of it for a long time and we can do better than we are. The standard we live to is our own, and we need to get perspective now, not fifty years from now.

From Casablanca:

"We musn't underestimate American blundering. I was with them when they blundered into Berlin in 1918."