Statistics

From Sunday's edition of the Seattle Times: Iraq's civilian death toll rises in August

Quoting the article:

"Figures provided by an Interior Ministry official indicated that 2,318 civilians died violently in the country in August, compared with 1,980 in July."

It's easy for you and me to condemn this war, and rightfully so, but do we appreciate the tremendous loss suffered by the families and friends of these people? Two thousand three hundred eighteen lives - like yours and mine, your best friend's, your lover's - ended by violent means in the month of August alone, and our attachment to these people is through a statistic in the newspaper, a number on the page, no more.

It's easy for you and me to wave these statistics around in condemnation of this war, then conveniently drown our sorrows at the pub with our comrades at the end of the week while waxing philosophical over these tragic circumstances; if only the thousands upon thousands of people around the world killed and maimed in the name of our luxury could be so lucky. Can we fully understand the plight of these folks if, in our minds, they are "them" and this is happening "over there"? It is happening to us, here, on Planet Earth, our home. It was not 2,318 "Iraqi civilians" who were slain last month, but 2,318 of our sisters and brothers, our mothers and fathers, our aunts and uncles, our cousins, nieces and nephews, our children. Are your parents statistics? Your siblings? Your friends and relatives? Your children? Would you continue sipping your coffee, then proceed to jet off to the office after learning your child had been slain in her schoolyard because some foreigners thought there was some oil or other raw material beneath it?

My intent is not to be hostile towards you, for your detachment from the rest of the world is by no means any fault of your own. The powers that be - the same gang of bandits responsible for the 2,318 fatalities in August, and the 1,980 deaths in July, and the 600-some-odd-thousand preceding deaths, and the more than three thousand American military fatalities, and the three thousand deaths on 11 September 2001 (yes, I hold these people responsible) and the billions of lives that have been shattered the world over at the hands of Western capitalism - this same cabal keeps you shrouded in ignorance by selling you product after product, by subjecting you to a lifetime of servitude so that you may put a roof over the heads of your loved ones and put food on their plates, by glossing over the day's events, then distracting you with professional sports, sitcoms and "entertainment news".

How many people are murdered each day inside the Empire? And how many of us do anything about it? The same group of business elites who perpetuate this and other wars for personal gain are flooding the streets with firearms and keeping these people in poverty so that they end up reverting to the gun for sustenance, and, for lack of the same awareness of one another I've just told you, these people will not hesitate to shoot you for their daily bread. This elite banditti, through their efforts to rape, pillage and plunder the planet, has succeeded in driving each of us to "insanity" by detaching us from one another; this is "divide and conquer" on a global scale, my friend, and we can't stop it until we realize what's happening to them in Iraq and everywhere else in the world, including in our own backyard, is happening to us!.

Otherwise, we, too, are nothing but statistics.