After work, then chores, I was idly flipping through stations on the teevee last night. I came across a pretty disturbing, but recognizable image on the History Channel: unmistakable footage from the late 1990's of what is apparently now known as the North Hollywood Shootout. In a nutshell--no pun intended--two, well, nuts figured that between the volume and variety of their weaponry and body armor they could rob a bank, and, if necessary, outgun the cops. They almost succeeded.
I remember seeing the news footage back then, and filed it away in my head as yet another example of how tenuous civil society is, and how quickly things can go to the proverpial hell-in-a-handbag.
Watching the same footage last night, I thought to myself: if they'd been in Baghdad in 2006--and if this was the ONLY thing that happened that day--the news media would probably comment on how "quiet" things were.
Last night over there saw yet another mother of all (deadly) fireworks display, as an 82 mm mortar round landed in a US weapons depot. Fifty more corpses--most tortured, like the sixty found on Monday--turned up around the city, and another seventeen were killed in a bomb explosion. New estimates of civilian casualties range from 450 to 600 thousand...numbers every bit the equal of those put up by the Butcher of Baghdad himself, Saddam Hussein (and now we're seeing another example of history turning full circle: mass graves).
This is the sort of stuff that the administration dismisses as "violence on the teevee screens." And I suppose that's pretty easy to do when it's "over there." But I wonder how we'd react to an ongoing toll like what we're now seeing in Iraq--or Afghanistan. 9/11 was bad enough.
Over there, it's 9/11 pretty much every day.
No comments:
Post a Comment