The following post is by MYRLN, a non-blogger who is Kalilily’s guest writer every Monday.
BANKRUPT
The number keeps growing. It’s already in the hundreds of thousands, and it keeps growing. What number? Iraqis killed since the U.S. invaded. Hundreds of thousands, most of them innocent people trying live in a virtually impossible situation. Hundreds of thousands killed by U.S. military or in sectarian violence or by perhaps-foreign insurgents or by private U.S. contract mercenaries. All since the U.S. turned Iraq upside-down with an unwarranted invasion.
Nobody here seems much to care. Media occasionally footnotes a news report with passing mention. Military shrugs with a fatalistic, “War, people die,” or an incredibly callous “collateral damage.” Administration, with its led-by-god’s-hand president, insists that we fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here.
That last is particularly galling. “Them” — who exactly does that refer to? After all, Iraqis were not responsible for 9/11, but when that point is made, the god-chosen president says nothing or simply repeats his “them” non-sequitur which actually means: “them,” you know, the ragheads, them “less-human-than us creatures over there in the Middle East.” Oh yeah…them. There better than here. In other words, let innocent Iraqis die so Americans don’t. (Sounds similar to the prez’s serving — or not — during ‘Nam.)
Okay, then here’s a question: if fighting there means no fighting here, then we must all be secure (here in sieg-heil “homeland”), right? Then why all the intrusive, scare-tactic “security” measures here in America? Why the stripping of Constitutional rights? After all, if we’re safe cuz innocent Iraqis are dying in our place, then we don’t need all those intimidating measures here, do we? (By the way, what color is the security alert level lately?)
It may all seem like a real puzzle, but actually it’s no puzzle at all. Behind every point and question raised above, there is a single, basic explanation for why hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis have died because of our presence in their land. And here’s the reason: we don’t care. Why not? Because America, in virtually its entirety, is morally bankrupt. We have tossed our moral compass in the trash cuz it was convenient to do so cuz it was getting in the way of our being pissed over 9/11, and keeping us from smashing anyone and anyplace we wanted. So our alleged “leaders” — all of them we elected, and their buddies — led us down the rose garden path with lies and scares and twisted logic.
But it’s not their fault. Nope. The fault lies with the rest of us. We let them have our moral compass. We readily made ourselves morally bankrupt so we could kick some butt. Anybody’s. Guilty or not.
Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis dead.
Shame on us.