"Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.
"This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves."
6 comments:
I don't get the comparison.... Iraq is an unstable, chaotic warzone. Virginia Tech is a college where young people go to learn.
Brilliant.
Absolutely brilliant.
I totally get it, it's certainly not a huge leap. As horrific as the events of that day were. These tragedies are happening 1000 fold in Iraq, yet we do not mourn them in the same way.
Are their lives not just as valuable?
It has nothing to do with value. It has to do with responsibility.
Our country created the mess that's in Iraq through a badly planned, totally unnecessary invasion. As Colin Powell told Bush, "You break it. You fix it." And instead of really understanding the destruction we have caused, we turn a blind eye to it and pretend it's "all their fault and what's wrong with those stupid people."
Our entire country has come to a halt because of one incident. And yet, because of us, their country suffers these incidents several times A DAY.
It's all a matter of perspective. Look at how we mourn our own and imagine the lives of those whose lives we've destroyed through our bumbling, incompetent leaders.
FYI, this is what I e-mailed in response to Mr. Schalchlin:
I disagree that we created the problem in Iraq. The MAIN causes of instability in the Middle East have existed for hundreds, if not thousands of years, far longer than the time we have even existed as a nation. Has the presence of our troops exacerbated the problem? Certainly. But, as in Darfur, and hundreds of other places where this disconnect happens, the problem is much larger than US.
While hindsight is certainly a factor here, I think we ARE, in part, to blame for what happened at Virginia Tech on Monday. This young man set off all sorts of red flags that he was going to do something like this. In theory, the larger classroom massacre could have been stopped after the first two murders. This event has stopped our country for the past 48 hours because that kind of stuff doesn't happen here everyday.
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