London Bombing

I've been thinking about the bombing this morning in London in amongst my work and have read some other bloggers comments about it. I think what Billmon expresses in his post comes the closest to how I feel:

The cold blooded murder of Londoners is no more horrifying than the murder or New Yorkers or Madrilenos -- or Baghdadis. But today's target still has a special hold over my emotions. If your mother tongue is English, and you loved stories as much as I did as a child, then London is the city of your imagination, of Mary Poppins and David Copperfield, of London-bridge-is-falling-down and the prince and the pauper. And if you've been there, and visited the places you dreamed about as a boy, and ridden the tube to Picadilly Circus, and climbed the stairs of the Tower of London, and strolled through Hyde Park in the morning fog, then what happened today hurts more than maybe it should, logically.

We are all New Yorkers, we are all Madrilenos, we are all Baghdadis. But I was a Londoner from the time I learned how to read. I know it shouldn't make any difference, but it does.

It really struck me this morning watching TV, look at Yahoo's home page, looking at what other bloggers have said, that what happened in London this morning has been happening in Baghdad now for over two years. Why don't we have the same outrage and the same empathy and the same reaction when it happens in Iraq? I think it is because most of us do not have the same emotional connection to Iraq or its people that we do to Great Britain.

I think Billmon says it in a the positive sense of why he feels a personal connection to London. But the ugly side of that is an inherent inability among humans to NOT feel a connection to other humans we perceive to be different from us. So, for far too many of us Iraqis are just too "other" for us to really feel their pain as they are bombed, day after day, by the same deadly destructive forces that just hit London this morning. Most of us Americans know very little about Iraq, its history, its people or its majority religion. And, besides, they're so brown.

Whenever I hear President Bush talk about how we are fighting the war on terrorism in Iraq so we don't have to fight it at home, I cringe. Doesn't anyone else in this country feel disgusted by that statement that it's okay if Iraqis are dying as long it keeps that ugly mess "over there"? I heard Senator McCain repeat that same disgusting statement this morning on CNN.

This is a ridiculous and morally bankrupt position to hold. It is not right to make Iraqis pay for our problems with Al Qaeda. It is also ridiculous to think that our attacking Iraq has helped keep the terrorism over there as if terrorism is containable and as if Iraq was the problem. We're making innocent people pay for our problem.

The second thing I've been thinking about today is how much the Bush Administration wants us to think that things are really going just swimmingly over in Iraq and how its just the nasty SCLM that is the problem. A group of conservative-leaning broadcasters are even going over there to take a look for themselves so they can tell us the "truth." What strikes me today is the horror we feel about what happened in London. So much so that I've already seen stories speculating that international travel may dip as a result. Who would say things are just great there today? What if this keeps happening, say, once a week in London? Would you actually say things are really pretty great in Wales today and so why are you focusing just on the bad news?

Can you not see that what London has just experienced in ONE DAY is what people in Baghdad have been experiencing since we invaded their county--OVER TWO YEARS? Even worse, they don't even have the everyday comforts that we take for granted and that are still present in London--clean water, sewage, electricity on demand, food to purchase, available gasoline.

And the Iraqis had NOTHING to do with 9/11 any more than any of the people on the buses and trains in London this morning.

May God bless the souls of all who are dying in this horrible cycle of violence.