More on "wrong place, wrong time"

In response to yesterday’s post about the lack of attention to the deaths caused by an illegal and unjust war in contrast to those of the students at Virginia Tech, I received an e-mail from my friend, Susan Lamont, who is very active with the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County. She sent the following letter to the editor and expressed doubts that it would be published in our “newspaper of record," the Press Democrat. Here’s her letter:

Editor:

My daughter Ellen, a Ph.D. student at NYU, called after the killings at Virginia Tech. A teaching assistant for a class on social movements, she had shown her students a documentary on the Vietnam War. The film crystallized her disbelief that there is anyone who lived through that war who can’t see the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq – that our wants do not supersede those of the citizens of other countries.

Ellen observed that daily we read of “56 killed in bombings across Iraq”, “ 32 killed in violence in Baghdad” and that most respond with a “ho-hum, I’m too busy.” Even if we care, we’re “not political.”

The backdrop of our lives is bloodshed. In most movies, for our entertainment, someone dies violently. When a young man suffers a psychotic break, we pump him full of bullets. We bomb, massacre, and torture to fuel our SUV’s.

And a young man in Virginia learned the U.S. lesson well. Just like George Bush, he knew that force is the answer. The beat poet, Diane di Prima, astutely observed, “This death culture cannot imagine solutions that do not bleed.”

But alternatives do exist. It’s time to start imagining them. It’s urgent.

Susan C. Lamont


Yesterday’s post included a link to a Washington Post article, Va. Killings Widely Seen as Reflecting a Violent Society. Scott Horton, an attorney active in human rights, president of the International League for Human Rights, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has a terrific blog, No Comment.

In his post this morning, The Tragedy at Virginia Tech Viewed from Abroad, Scott summarizes comments from newspapers in Spain, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom. From these comments, Scott concludes, “Around the world, America is being portrayed as a land of wanton violence, obsessed with firearms—as the locus of a bizarre death cult. The grounds for this are not simply what happened at Virginia Tech and Columbine High School, but the way the American public has reacted to these tragedies.”

(photo of dead Iraqi child - ChuckCurrieblogs.com)

"At the wrong place, at the wrong time"

Yesterday, as I drove home after spending 24 hours helping care for my ten week-old twin grandchildren, I listened to snippets of speeches from the convocation in memory of the students who were killed at Virginia Tech on Monday. What I remember most vividly is Bush saying that the victims were “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This is so true. They were hapless victims of a random killer, and we mourn their deaths and injuries.

My problem is that we in this country don’t appear to mourn the deaths of others across the world “in the wrong place at the wrong time ” like the Iraqi child in the photo.

I’m not alone. My favorite bloggers, Juan Cole of Informed Comment and Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com feel the same way.

Yesterday Juan wrote Iraq has two Virginia Techs every day: “The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. …[by] next Tuesday I will…report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?"

In his post yesterday, Juan linked to what he wrote On February 26: “A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.”

My question: How many of us paid attention to this “incident,” so similar to what happened at Virginia Tech?

In Tom Engelhardt’s excellent post, Words to Die For, published the same day as the Virginia killings, he states: “…. this Monday -- the "early" tallies showed 6 GIs and 69 Iraqis killed and 39 wounded (and we're only talking about immediately reported bodies here); while on the previous day, 5 GIs, 2 Britons, and 109 Iraqis died (with 173 were wounded), and on the day before that, 164 Iraqis were killed, 345 injured, and 26 kidnapped. In terms only of the recorded dead of those three "normal" days of "stability and security" under the President's "surge" plan, we're talking, in terms of the dead, about the equivalent of more than 12 Virginia-Tech-style massacres.”

This evening, as I checked the online news, I read an Associated Press story, Four bombs kill at least 178 in Baghdad, …”the deadliest day in the city since the start of the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in central Baghdad, killing at least 122 people and wounding 148, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.”

Certainly those who were killed in Baghdad were also “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

How does the world view the Virginia killings? According to this morning’s Washington Post article, Va. Killings Widely Seen as Reflecting a Violent Society, “Officials, newspaper columnists and citizens around the world Tuesday described the Virginia Tech massacre as the tragic reflection of an America that fosters violence at home and abroad, even as it attempts to dictate behavior to the rest of the world.”

It’s time to take stock of who we are and what we believe about the value of all human lives.