One death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.— Joseph Stalin
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Have we become numb to the body count as it rises like a flood of grief in this inscrutable and indefensible war? I say we have. We’ve lost sight of their faces. The bonds of spirit between us are broken by horrible enormity of truth and the anesthesia of lies and the opiate of Fear Itself.
"I think it is true that when the numbers rise then it becomes less of a special case, we do become somewhat numb to it," said Paul Levinson, chair of the Fordham University Department of Communication and Media Studies.
I say inscrutable because we can’t see where it came from, how it spreads like a stain of gore on the earth, or where it takes us – fists clenched and hearts battered, into tomorrow.
I say indefensible because there is no reason for it. Nothing George W. Bush has ever said about its reason has been true. It is all bloody lies. He has no excuse for getting so many American young men and women killed. Please understand, I say it has been and is for nothing. Our nation is not being defended, nor our friends. Our dead of 9/11 are not being avenged. None of the 44274 – 49157 reported Iraqi civilian dead had a damn thing to do with that. None of them posed the smallest threat to us. And the democracy – which became the excuse when other lies dried up – is not being established in Iraq.
Did the Iraqi people want our form of government so badly they were willing to pay for it with tens of thousands of innocent lives? Did they?
What the hell are we doing in Iraq? Saving it from the Tyranny of Saddam? His ass is in jail.
This war is nothing but the insane and megalomaniacal whim of a man who never should have been president. He should spend the rest of his life going from home to home of every soldier he got killed, and helping to care for their children. He should cut the crusts off their sandwiches, tie their laces and send them to school. He should wash their faces, tuck them into bed, and sing them to sleep. He should sleep in the hall on the floor. And when they wake in the night fatherless and afraid, he can explain this hell to them. Because he has not explained it to you or me.
Metaphor 