 When
I was a kid I would occasionally awaken in the middle
of the night with a sense that someone was in my room.
Maybe it was a monster or perhaps a murderer. My strategy
was to close my eyes tightly and pretend it wasn’t
there. Soon, I would fall back asleep, and, in the morning,
everything would be alright.
Now,
when I say that, most people say that they would never
have been able to fall back to sleep, but I think they
are wrong. We have successfully closed our eyes and
slept through the monstrous events in Darfur and the
monstrous effects of our war in Iraq.
 I
was a child for most of the war in Vietnam. Still, I
remember very vividly Walter Cronkite’s voice
and the striking black-and-white images of that war.
Time Magazine, Newsweek and others
also painted a picture of what was going on half a world
away. Some of those images forever burned themselves
into our national consciousness:
Today
television and Internet images are an even more ubiquitous
part of our national culture. Yet, images from the war
in Iraq are strangely absent. The Pentagon goes to great
effort to ensure that flag-draped coffins are not seen
on the evening news. And while every anchor or reporter
whose name we know has spent time in bed with the troops
in Iraq (yes, that phrase is deliberate), what we have
seen has been carefully choreographed.
 While
American military estimates have been in the range of
25,000, the BBC reports that over 100,000
civilians have died since the war began.
But who would know? Those figures get buried, and the
images get censored. As a result, the war in Iraq has
become a sterilized discomfort in the backs of the minds
of most Americans. When one mentions the “cost
of the war” almost all thoughts go to the financial
cost.
Last
week, Bob Herbert wrote an editorial in the New
York Times entitled “Lifting the Censor’s
Veil on the Shame of Iraq.” In it, he talks about
a veteran who returned from the war with horrifying
images that no one had ever seen. The images were quite
common, but they have been kept hidden by the media’s
cooperation with the Administration’s incredibly
comprehensive propaganda machine.
And
so we close our eyes, and our conscience falls asleep.
Even if one supports the war in Iraq, it is critical
that EVERYONE be fully aware of the full cost of this
war or any war. For what this war has cost thus far
we could have fed every starving child until they were
grown. We could have provided health insurance to every
American. We could have remodeled every public school
in American or raised teachers’ salaries to a
level sufficient enough to attract and retain the brightest
and best. Who knows what diseases we might have been
able to find a cure for - perhaps the one from which
you will die. We need to understand the financial cost.
Beyond
that, though, we need to look into the eyes of Iraqi
children who are missing limbs or mothers. We must understand
that the unarmed man that a soldier shot today was someone’s
son and that his mother loved him as much as yours loves
you. War, even for those who support it, must not ever
be sterilized, or we will love it too much and wage
it too readily.
War
may sometimes be a necessary evil. But no matter how
necessary, it is always an evil, never a good. We
will not learn how to live together in peace by killing
each other's children.
- Jimmy Carter
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Ferrell
Drum 