Fuji - "knowing what death is"

11:27 pm - "knowing what death is"

I just read an essay by E.L. Doctorow titled, "An Essay on Death and President Bush" where he states in the first paragraph, "I fault this president (George W. Bush) for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty-one year olds who wanted to be what they could be," criticizing President Bush's true understanding of the cost of war. I couldn't help but thinking about crosses recently laid out on the Santa Barbara beach, one for each soldier killed since the beginning of the Iraq war. It was a stunning image, crosses outstretched in parallel rows at the opening of Stern's Warf. I stopped to view the crosses, some with pictures of the dead soldiers, some with flowers and notes posted by them, and I couldn't help but feel an overwhelming sadness looking at all the lives lost, and knowing that more were being killed most likely at the very moment. Although I feel compassion for the soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the families who have lost loved ones in the war, I can't help but wonder if any of us really knows "what death is?" How many of us "suffer the death" of every soldier killed in Iraq and around the world. Although the essay is a criticism of President Bush and his unaccountability for the lives lost and the war itself, are we as a country and as a people any less accountable?

Every morning I turn my computer on and listen to NPR while reading the top headlines from the Associative Press, and every morning I hear and read about soldiers killed in a suicide bombing or an attack by the Iraqi insurgence. I read and listen to this news and often times I dismiss it as just another day, while just a few hours earlier the families of the soldiers killed were notified that their son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife, mother, or father was killed earlier that day. How many of us truly know what the cost of war is, what death is?


http://www.veteransforpeace.org/Arlington_west_121003.htm#Chapter%2054%20Santa%20Barbara%20CA

http://www.mwblog.com/involved/archives/2005/06/an_essay_on_dea.php