There's nothing wrong with some healthy skepticism; like the kind
I expressed earlier today after reading
Beth McKiernan's opinion piece in the Register today.
As it turned out, Beth did get some facts wrong. From her piece (emphasis mine):
He saw a girl who reminded him very much of his own daughter turned into something unrecognizable as human when she was run over by a tank.
Here's the
ABC piece (emphasis mine):
Sgt. John Newport left Iraq months ago, but he is still struggling with what he experienced there. He keeps playing one scene over and over again in his mind.
It took place when he was in his Humvee, passing a convoy of trucks that was hauling tanks. One of the truck drivers tossed a bag of M&Ms at a bunch of Iraqi kids.
A little girl went to pick it up, but there was a truck behind her. The driver didn't see her, and ran her over.
The girl wasn't run over by a tank. It was a truck carrying a tank.
Probably something like this. Is that nit-picking? Or are the facts rather flexible things? I suppose it is when the Register prints one-sided
puff propaganda like they did a couple of weeks ago when they publicized the Never-Ending Rachel Corrie Martyrdom Tour by her twisted parents.
Beth's opening paragraphs seemed suspicious since she didn't indicate where she saw this report. Google doesn't capture everything, but it captures a lot. You can be sure that anti-war web sites would certainly profile any instance where our military would even accidentally run over a little girl attempting to grab a box of M&Ms thrown to her like people do during parades.
This is one of the many searches I attempted, but as you can see there's nothing out there.
Here's the rest of Beth's ridiculous column:
We can go to bed at night with a clear conscience, worrying only about a speech we have to give in the morning or the report our boss wants done for next week. Life would be far too overwhelming if we seriously considered the atrocities taking place in our town, country, and world.
However, ignoring these problems only allows them to fester and grow. Perpetuating ignorance becomes something we do actively, and willingly we commit ourselves to the illusion that the world isn't so bad.
Where are we going with this?
It is too easy for a human being to become a number. The farther away he is, and the more people suffering with him, the less we care about the individual himself. The fate of the little girl is clearly a tragedy, but what about the tens of thousands of other Iraqi civilians killed and injured during the war? It is impossible to mourn a number, especially when it is composed largely of zeroes. Three-dimensional people with lives, families, and aspirations are quite simply flattened and squashed together into inert figures on paper. Some vague crisis is always taking place in a third-world country somewhere, in a place so far removed from modern American life that we can't view these people in the same way we do those in our daily lives.
You could spend hours deconstructing this bullshit.
Some vague crisis is always taking place in a third-world country somewhere is a typical sentence written by somebody whose grasp of international situations is limited to agreeing with David Gilmour, the guitarist from Pink Floyd,
regarding what the proper percentage of GDP the Yanks should be contributing to corrupt rulers, racist dictators, and those who practice genocide in Africa.
The remedy for our appalling indifference is just that: a personal connection. The soldier was so scarred by the Iraqi girl's death because she reminded him so much of his own daughter, and was not only the same age but even wore clothes he could imagine his daughter wearing. We can no longer just click off the television set following a half-hour news program filled with murder, rape, torture, theft, and suffering. There are questions we must ask ourselves - what if it were me? What about my friend? Brother? Daughter? Father?
Of course, these questions alone are the main ingredients in a recipe for deep depression. We can neither shield ourselves by ignoring the misery of others nor become so deeply immersed in empathy that we feel too crushed to function.
Listen, witnessing another person's tragic death is going to be stressful on anybody, especially when it's a child. But what are you going to do? An accident is an accident.
The only solution that comes to mind would be to eliminate suffering itself. Then we wouldn't have to ignore it or have it keeping us awake at night.
Christ. Who have you been listening to?
Sheryl Crow?The major cause of depression is a feeling of helplessness, so there is no use in doubting we all have power to change the world. Only after humanizing one another can we work together to fix humanity's problems.
This will make it more difficult to open a newspaper and read passively of famine, disease, and war; we will instead be motivated to get up and leave our delusions and apathy behind.
The horrors cultivated by the dark side of human nature will be buried if we take action, if we change lifeless numbers back into people just like the ones we know.
After all, if every soldier approaching a battlefield were to mentally switch places with someone on the other side, how much killing would take place?
Listen, Beth, do you not understand who the enemy is here? It's these people called Islamofascists. I know that's a big word for you, but hear me out.
These Islamofascists would want everybody forcibly converted to
Wahhabism. But they probably wouldn't forcibly convert you. They'd probably execute you because you're an educated woman writing a column in a newspaper. Then they'd go find your family, rape the women, rape the men, and then kill them all. Or torture them, and then kill them.
Even if all that didn't happen, you'd be covered head-to-toe in black, wearing a burqa, and submitting to whatever any male with a Kalashnikov says. And it would probably happen right after he got done doing the goat.
They want to bring down free governments, separation of church and state, free speech, capitalism, most buildings other than mosques, bomb innocents in subways and buses, kill all the Jews, torture all the Christians and other infidels, and generally ravage the world back to about the 7th century.
Yes, the entire world.
So, Beth, when you write that you want
our soldiers to consider mentally switching places with people like that, it just proves that
you're so damn stupid that you should fit in quite nicely at the University Of Iowa, a school that gave Pierre
"Absoloutly Furiours" Pierce and Leana
"One million animals are killed in this country every hour so we can bury their bodies in our stomachs" Stormont a chance to become who they are now.
This
Young Adult Board of Contributors that the Register has cooked up has offered some of the worst writing ever. Witness
Sasha Kemmet's recent lame-ass column and followup or
Heidi Schnackenberg's drivel as other examples.
And if you think their weird and sub-sophomoric world views provide fodder for the blogosphere, just imagine what is being said at kitchen tables and in diners across this state.
