Letters to the Editor
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Mistaken!
You write that the Yezidis killed 23 people - but, it was 23 Yezidis who were killed in retaliation for stoning a Sunni woman to death.
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Stop it Stop it Stop it
It's bad enough when Charles Krauthammer decides to start using VT as political fodder. It's just as bad when my local anti-abortionists write letters to my local paper linking abortion to everything from VT to Pearl Harbor. But today I'm sick of turning one miserable event into a metaphor for another miserable event to justify a political stance.
And the writer's claim that "But as we have seen, for Bush, 9/11 removed the constraints of law...now acting in the name of God...and those truths were bigger than logic -- Cheney's "analysis" and "evidence" -- " somehow isn't equating America or Bush with that insane/possibly autistic teenager? Wow. Sure looks close.
There's a whole Mongol Horde of high-horses in this friggin' essay, and in this letters section. The very first letter states that Bush needed a war to boost his popularity. Bush's post-9/11 approvals were at 70%, and we already had a handy war in Afghanistan that the whole world was behind.
There was no conspiracy, just a bunch of idealistic cons wanting empire to make the nation secure.
And there is no comparison between a teen-ager who barely spoke even to his own family and stalked women he barely knew, with a political movement of thousands of highly-degreed leaders operating out of fear. It's a comparison between a rabid dog and a buffalo stampede.
And to force this metaphor to make political hay makes you as bad as Krauthammer and everybody else.
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When I pointed out years ago
that gun toting Palestinian 'youth' wore t-shirts indistinguishable from my own kids, people laughed and called me a delusional racist. There isn't even a lexicon for that kind of brittle burnished irony.
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A tale of two horrors
Mr. Kamiya writes a truly elegant article. There can never be enough written about how the Bush administration so blatantly raped a country, both ours and Iraq. If, when he leaves office, he is not taken directly to be tried for war crimes, may his conscience eat him cell by cell.
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This article is insulting
The Virginia Tech shootings have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the war in Iraq. If you want to make a point about the Iraq war, make a point about the Iraq war (a war which I have opposed since the beginning). Don't exploit a tragedy so as to have some cheap political rhetoric. This article is no better than tyrades about how liberalism led to the massacre last week.
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I'm sure they are still laughing
There's nothing in the lexicon for that because it doesn't make any sense. Kind of like your earlier "decoding" of Kamiya's piece. Your t-shirt comment is a rather odd non-sequitor.
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I'm sorry
I can't hear you over the sound of how awesome I am.
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Let's see if I can make it simple for Gary
If I can simply it, maybe Salon can find another writer (besides Kamiya) to contribute their opinion on the mess in the Middle East? I hope so. So here goes:
This is why we care about the students at Virginia Tech: they are mostly (though not all) white and middle class. They are attractive, and successful. They look like us. They practice the same religion we do. They speak English. They look like our own kids. They ARE us. When we think of them being dead, we can look at ourselves or our kids and imagine the same thing happening to them, and we are horrified....our sympathy is engaged. The idea of losing your young adult child, just at the beginning of their future lives, is almost unbearable.
This is why we do NOT care about 650,000 (or more likely, 68,000) Iraqi's: They are not us. They live far away. They speak a different, funny sounding language. They don't live here. We would never see them if they were not on TV -- if we had not invaded their country, we wouldn't have spent 2 seconds thinking about them in our whole lives. They dress funny. They don't look like us. They are mostly poor. They practice a strange religion, with a bunch of sects that make no sense to us. Oh, and let's not forget: they have dark complexions!
For the record, we care even less if you are even funnier looking (or sounding), because if you want to see an example of us NOT CARING AT ALL, just look at Darfur! The darker your skin, the less we care about what happens to you. Unless it affects us -- like in the gas tank. Then we care about our gas tanks.
So -- don't we even care about our own soldiers dying in Iraq? Here is why not: they are stupid, lower middle class kids. They are not smart, mostly white, young college students. If they were, they would be safely (well, except for example above) in college and not getting their asses shot off halfway around the world. Getting killed in Iraq is an acceptable risk that lower middle class and poor kids take in order to try to get money for college. If they get killed -- oh well. It wasn't my kid, so what do I care? If they were not fighting in Iraq, most would be back in the US, working at Walmart. They are not me, they are not "mine" -- they are "the other". They probably have bad taste, wear polyester, don't eat organic foods, vote Republican, and so on. They are EXPENDABLE.
How will the war ever end? Gee, you must be too young to remember Vietnam! We will get sick and tired of fighting, declare a victory, hand the reins over to the Iraqi government which will immediately crumble. The country will collapse into regional squabbles and constant warfare, only without us.
In time, a great many Iraqi's will immigrate to the US and we will be too ashamed not to let them in. Presumably, they will fill the gap in nail salon operations when the Vietnamese and Koreans move on.
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A face to mental illness.
We humanize one set of victims and dehumanize another. The VT victims are given families, dreams and futures. The people in Iraq are not granted the same luxury. Frankly, Bush was the shooter in Iraq, walked in with his fantasies and started killing in some fantasy of justice. Our National mental illness that we are the unique and supreme power on the planet.
Regarding Cho, the issue that is not being talked about is Mental Illness and how ill equiped we are to diagnose and treat it. Cho was mentally ill. As any parent knows who has had a child with severe mental illness, there is a fantasy that the doctors will know what to do and will tell you how to treat your child. They don't and if they do, it's your health insurance that prescribes the treatment. Some meds and go home. We need to seriously look at how mental illness is being treated in this country. If someone with cancer or a broken limb was treated the way we treat the mentally ill we would all be up in arms. Some investigative reporter should explore how the health insurance influenced his treatment.
Blame the internet, blame guns, blame video games, blame, blame blame. In the long run, some 24 year old insurance company clerck makes the decision: no coverage for hospitilization of the mentally ill. All we do is contain people with cocktails of medication. Mental illness is real and it's not being treated. We spend more energy and resources treating the unhappy people with drugs than we do to treat the people that are truly suffering.