Reality check from Baghdad

While the media drenching sings it's continual vulturish melodrama about the Virginia Tech massacre...an equal number of people have just died in Baghdad today. 33. Probably that number will go higher as the reports continue to roll in**. And this happens every day in Iraq (and other places). Some days it's much, much worse.

        **UPDATE: In fact the final toll, as I heard it, was 157.

But, um, does anyone really care about that? I mean, it's on the other side of the world, and it's a "war", so I guess it's not as tragic, right? Somehow, it's not as "senseless", is it? Since after all our troops are there killing for Freedom...and the shi'a and the sunni are murdering for their respective variations of God's prophet...so it's okay. Just as long as there's a reason for it, slaughter is okay I guess.

At least, that's how it seems. We rightly see the deaths of so many people on an American campus as a tragedy (though it won't be enough to stop us from protecting gun "rights"), but somehow many of our fellow citizens and certainly our media are portraying this as far more horrible, far more terrible...and lots of excuses are furnished: The supposed "safe" place, the exuberance of youth cut down in a place of learning and light, etc., etc., but I fail to see a cogent argument that can justify any group of people's lives being worth more than any others'.

In fact, I think what's going on snugly far away from America is much worse, because the actions of a single gunman, gone mad perhaps, are unpredictable... whereas the slaughter and constant depredation in Iraq was intentionally launched by people supposedly responsible and circumspect. It was created intentionally and is supported by the economy of a nation of hundreds of millions. And it goes on and on, every day, year after year.

But of course, that won't cramp the style of all the candlelight vigils and television 'specials', and baseball teams wearing VTech hats, and everything that goes with this maudlin ceremony, forgetting the horror currently playing out under our name half a world away, and focusing on the acts of a lone gunman.

Before anyone sends me hate mail, I suppose I should qualify that of course I view what happened in Virginia as horrible and I cannot imagine, nor do I want to try, what the near-miss survivors and bereaved family members must be going through right now. My point is that I fail to see why it deserves so much more attention, and is seemingly viewed as such a greater tragedy, because it's not. People being shot down anywhere in the world, for any reason, is a despicable and cowardly act. But it's happening every day in a theater of our creation...and yet we seem not to care much about that anymore. Maybe we just needed something new to make us give a damn.