Letters to the Editor
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Probably as much coverage...
as Salon gives to the perpetrators of the events. You really are transparent in your utter hatred for Bush. It's so intense that you don't even see the people that are the villians.
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A Cheap Shot
And unfortunate. Conflating Iraq with the Blacksburg shooting is in about as poor taste as you can manage. The two are entirely unrelated. There is more than enough going in Iraq to justify attacks on our policies there without using deaths here for comparison. And it serves no one to do so - least of all, "our" side.
It's not a Derbyshire moment. But it's in the same league.
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How many days does Iraq *only* lose 33 people?
Not many I bet. I wish to God Americans could care 1/1000th as much about Iraqi civilians as about college students. What is the difference between them??? They are all people.
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Thank you
I have been hunting all over waiting for someone to make this point. You are the first one I have found.
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The important connection between Iraq and VT is, of course...
...if the students of VT had the same access to guns as Iraqis, just think how much better things would have been.
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If Tiberius cared about anyone besides himself,
then Tiberius would hate Bush too.
See Tiberius, it's good to hate those who do bad things. It's not at all the same as what Bush lovers do: hating people who don't do bad things.
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You WILL get lambasted again, Tim...
...but you are completely, 100% correct this time. I'd earlier sent my son a news story about these latest deaths in Iraq with almost exactly the same comment you made, questioning whether the Va. Tech story would still overshadow Iraq on the network news.
I'll be the most surprised person in Ohio if these 178 deaths in Iraq aren't buried beneath the flood of ongoing Va. Tech reports. And what DOES make these deaths in Iraq automatically less important to everyone, including the President, than Monday's college shootings?
You wondered about convocations -- I'd like to ask about lowering our nation's flags to half-mast to honor any of the 3000+ American deaths in Iraq, or the tens of thousands of Iraqis who've perished. Don't hold your breath; we'll NEVER see THAT, not least because our flags would have to stay at half-mast for years.
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Can Americans draw the parallel?
I think it is safe to say that the answer to Tim Grieve's question is no. I must take this post even further and ask my fellow Americans, for how long would you be able to put up with the VA Tech tragedy day in and day out?
As Mr. Grieve has said, not to take anything away from the VA Tech families' horrible nightmare, but why is it so easy for Americans not directly linked to this tragedy to express outrage that something like this could happen to the United States and not feel the same level of empathy for Iraqis? They have to deal with a constant barrage of violence every single day. Imagine being scared to go to the market, bank or work all the time; or facing the reality that everyone you know has lost someone they love.
We are country that is too isolated and values the lives of non-citizens too little. Once the nation's attention is pulled away from the massacre at VA Tech, I hope we will start asking these hard questions rather than turn back to the celebrity break-up of the moment.
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Blacksburg to Baghdad
Thank you for pointing this out. If nothing else, the tragic events at Blackburg should have helped us all awaken to the reality that Iraqi students and their families experience every waking moment of their lives. For us, this is a bizarre, tragic, uncommon event. For residents of Baghdad, this is life as they know it. A big news event in Baghdad would be a day WITHOUT a horrifying massacre.
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Tim...
Good point. You'll get hit on it...but we need to be reminded that people are dying in other places as the result of a carefully planned and premeditated attack. The violence in Iraq isn't the result of random insanity or mental instability. It is the result of carefully planned (or un-carefully planned) premeditative attack.
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A more relevant question
Do the Iraqis give as much -- let alone five times as much -- of their media attention to their dead as the US has given to the Va.Tech incident?
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"Tiberius = "troll"
But then we knew that from Suetonius...
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Sean,
If they had electricity they might.
Actually Olbermann touched on this idea that we focus more on ourselves than what goes on overseas (even if it's to our own) last nite but it was already nagging at me the 33 is, more or less, the daily violent death count in Bagdad and environ. And that's in a country with the size and population of texas.
Horrible news to be sure but, unfortunately, there is plenty to go around.
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re: Iraqi news coverage of the Iraq War
It's just a guess on my part, but I'd be surprised if the level of war coverage inside Iraq is much different from the Katrina coverage by the New Orleans Times-Picayune during and immediately after that city's devastating floods.
In other words (to steal one of the President's favorite verbal tics), "All Katrina, All the Time" -- and so it almost certainly must be in Iraq.
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Sad and true.
It is a tough parallel to draw, but an important one. How would we function as a nation if events like that at VTech happened nearly twice a day for 4 years? It amazes me that there are still places where 100 people gather in Iraq.
Another thing I have heard often is "I can't imagine what they are going through," in regards to the victims/families of victims. The phrase is repeated over and over on call in shows and I think it's pretty dishonest. Perhaps a better statement would be "I don't want to imagine what they are going through."
We should really try to, as a nation, imagine what the people affected by the VTech tragedy are going through. Then we should take it a step further and try to imagine what the Iraqi people are going through.
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You've got your signals crossed
Official bullshit bleeding for Iraqis is next week. This week is bullshit bleeding for Darfur. Don't get caught toting the wrong sign.
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Perspective
For some perspective, imagine Blacksburg happening in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and D.C. all in one day. That is what happened in Iraq today.
Now imagine that, over the past four years, 650,000 American civilians had died either directly or indirectly as the result of similar acts of violence--that is the estimate of Iraqi civilian deaths caused by the war since March of 2003, according to a study conducted by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and Al Mustansiriya University in Baghdad (read more about this study at the Bloomberg School of Public Health's website).