Reply #45: This thread demonstrates a few things I have noticed over the years

[Julius Civitatus]

I think this is an interesting thread, a clever exercise that may help some people put in perspective the horror and the magnitude of the tragedy that has been the invasion of Iraq. But I think the fact that we need to engage on this type of extrapolations may be an indication of some issues that we, as a society, need to face:

• We (in the good ol' USA) have a huge problem sympathizing with the human suffering of other peoples, cultures and countries. I don't mean everybody, but in general (as in public opinion, general feelings).
  
  We usually don't give two shits about any other country or culture unless we have a stake or war over there. Just like the Roman empire, we are content with the thought that only what's in the realm of our borders matters, and anyone outside these borders are uncivilized savages.
  
  
• We usually have to play rhetorical exercises like this one, extrapolating them to us, in order to make some people see that yes, violating the human rights of others is actually a bad thing. Why is it so difficult to make some of our fellow citizens see that no, not because we do it is right. And no, violating human rights in itself is wrong. Some truths are just self-evident, yet difficult to see for some.
  
  
• There is a chunk of the population with a heartless moral indifference to all this that is going on. Some people can perfectly go through life thinking all "those people" are bad, and that we are still looking for WMD that apparently Osama hid under Saddam's bed. Indiscriminate bombings, torture, rape, Abu Grahib, and the shooting of civilians doesn't seem to strike a chord with a huge chunk of the population of this country (likely the 33% that still revere Commander Coocoo-Bananas).
  
  
• Some people really think we are always the 'good guys,' no matter what we do. Things like the Ishaqi massacre can take place, and we are the good guys. No matter what. You see, our leaders tell us "freedom is messy," and we can go on through the day without a second thought about the deep, horrible cruelty of those words in the context of what they justify.

It's depressing buit true. We need to start facing the fact we have become an isolated bubble, an island that only cares (and barely) about what goes on inside, and the rest in non-existant or simply sub-human. This may be part of the problem, and something that may explain a lot of the things we are witnessing.