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After losing 33 men and women this morning, I hope that some small sliver of awareness will come out of this tragedy. It is my sincerest hope that this terrible event and the attendant wall-to-wall media coverage will at least give some Americans pause the next time they see a bland and depressingly common headline buried in the coverage of their local newspaper stating 33 or 53 or 67 or 71 or 102 IRAQIS KILLED IN SECTARIAN BLOODSHED.
The fact that we lost 33 people today should not obscure the fact that in Iraq, this would be a commonplace, almost weekly occurrence. To be sure, these college students do not live in a combat zone -- neither they, nor we can readily be expected to blithley accept this kind of violence -- but much of the sectarian violence in Baghdad is in fact eerily similar to this event, marauding gunment kidnapping, brutalizing and executing civilians.
I hope that this tragedy and our national response to it will at least give those on the right some sense of empathy as to why the Iraqi people are not overjoyed with the "gift" we have given them. Imagine if an event such as this were repeated again and again, day in and day out, here, in America, for four straight years.
