Tuesday, April 26, 2005

Seeing what's important...

If this was a different time and a different country (such as the one we lived in pre-9/11) the news that our search for WMDs in Iraq is officially over would surely merit mega-headlines. As it is, though, you can hardly find a peep about it in today's news. This post-9/11 age has so completely buried concern for displaying the truth that the posting Monday evening of a 92-page report addendum by the CIA's Iraq Survey Group will be little more than yet another barrel of dread over the dam. Can you imagine any other time in our history when Americans would barely shrug when confronted with the news that our reason for a pre-conceived, unilateral War turned out to be false? The World is always filled with ugly, destructive, unjust stories of power being used by the few to hurt the far-more-many. The daily turf battles in our nation's capital are alarmingly gross. The media seems only to want stories of fallen celebrities or evil child murderers to distract attention away from the rot and inequity all around our communities. But the end of the WMD "search" should somehow reach a different level when you look at the tally that is rapidly approaching 1600 dead Americans over there, well over 10,000 young bodies so terribly injured as to alter those lives forever, over $300B and counting in appropriations poured down that sandy money pit, not to mention the unaddressed death and destruction on the Iraqi side of the ledger. All I can do is keep on reading the news, hoping that someday somehow the rest of this country will start to call for accountability from the Bushies and their stalwarts in Congress. Freedom is NOT on the march. Falseness and fear of admitting our Nation's mistakes have trod us all deeper into the muck...

Luckily just as I was further descending into a diatribe, Maya got fussy and wanted some attention. I picked her up from her bouncey chair and soon enough she'd barfed all over my shoulder. Blech. And now she's raising holy hell after being returned to the chair. News stories always raise my temperature when I see editorial and political judgments outweighing what I see as the importance of the story. But when you've got an unhappy child relying on you to make the world "all better" the rest seems rather unimportant. As I've hunt-and-pecked these last few sentences with Maya cradled in one arm, she's fallen asleep. In that, I suppose, I've accomplished something this mid-morning. Hope all's well for y'all otherwise.

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