The Pangs of Your Sadness Shall Pass...

[Mr_Jefferson_24]

by Christopher Cooper

http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0203-20.htm

<snip>

Oh, and there was this: “An Iraqi soldier also was hurt.” No doubt. No news there, either, sadly. Iraqi dead pile up like cord wood. I remember Vietnam; I wrote a letter to CBS News suggesting that the (inflated, exaggerated, made up) number of Viet Cong and North Vietnamese dead that Walter Cronkite intoned daily, weekly, be called by some more specific and truthful label than “enemy”. Whose enemies? Cronkite's? CBS News' ? Bob McNamara's? Mine? Was CBS delivering news, or was it helping the Pentagon sell a particular story about a war that was not what it seemed to be?

At the same time I was faulting CBS and Walter Cronkite I was reading Matthew Arnold. The Victorian essayist wrote of a newspaper account of an alleged infanticide that concluded with the sentence, “Wragg is in custody.” He found the name of the accused woman ugly and unpleasant, which consideration we may debate as we would our tastes in music or art. But he also reflected on the ugliness of a society that reduced any human being, even an accused murderer, to such a coarse, terse, unfeeling and uncaring description. Arnold said that whenever the successful, the favored, the well-off claim for their time, their society, their way of life that a noble and deserved height has been reached, someone should remind them that, underneath it all, the poor, the abused, the cursed and neglected persist, just so: “Wragg is in custody.” You can read it yourself. It made a big impression on me.

So it's too bad two well-paid, well-fed, well-educated, well-housed white American men who were precisely where they wanted to be, doing exactly what they most wanted to do, were so grievously wounded. I don't begrudge them a nickel's worth of the money ABC News or the Disney corporation or you and I are spending to help them heal. I hope they return whole to their jobs, to their families, to our television screens.

But here we are still equating victims with heroes, as long as the dead and wounded look like us and live like us. Certainly some were heroes among the three thousand who were killed on that terrible September morning in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania, just as there are heroes and heroic actions and noble sacrifices on whatever real or manufactured front we set our young men and women to fight and die. But some, many, never get a chance to be heroes—they just get dismembered, cut up, blown apart, crushed, wasted.

<snip>

[JohnyCanuck]

1. Good point

But suppose every nameless, faceless fourteen year old boy or infant girl or old man or woman or mother or father or Iraqi soldier who was wounded got a third of the nightly news time on the day he or she lost a leg or an eye or a future. Would we watch and listen and care? Would they be heroes? Or just victims? Or only “collateral” or “regrettable” damage?

http://nobravery.cf.huffingtonpost.com/