We're Goin' to Jersey?

I, and, I would guess, most of my countrymen, as well as those countrymen from most modern nations accross the globe, have become--or perhaps always were--effectively and efficiently numb to the violence in Iraq. The daily headlines of carbombs and suicides and hostages is little more than news-clutter in my newspaper, ranking just above the obits page and just below the stock quotes. What's more, as a self-professed educated "deep-thinker" whose campaign for "two-sided consideration" is predominately a one-sided campaign for the underdog of any given day, these stories and number scrolling past on the death-toll shock-ticker have essentially no bearing on my little-thought-out and increasingly-wide-spread liberal philosophy that the problem isn't them, its us, and that the answer isn't stopping their violence, it's stopping our international Tom-foolery. (Even if that isn't the 10-cent summary of your politics--and in all honestly, I'd certainly like to think it's not mine--there are a hell of a lot of Bush-bashing, sandal-wearing, upper-middle class "educated" folks out there that would get caught within the range of that political buckshot, myself included.)

Then, I saw this. And in an instant (even if only for an instant) my pascifist framework was blown away and the underdog (or I suppose could make the argument that, temporarily, there was simply a new underdog) was the target of all my blame. I wanted to rain down upon those shithead Sunni bleacher-bombing motherfuckers with the power and fury of my God--a $420 billion dollar yearly supply of cruise missles and tomcats and F-16's and steath this and stealth that and apache's and nighthawks and aircraft carriers and destroyers and mother-fucking nuclear submarines and nuclear missles anti-air missles and anti-ground missles and anti-missle missles and spec ops troups and seals and snipers and gruntmen with big motherfucking guns and small tanks and big tanks and tanks that do 40-0 in 0 ft and make blowing the shit out of tree's the funnest fucking thing you've ever fucking done and I don't want to stop until every single arab ass-hole who even looks like might want to go blow up a bunch of soccer-playing kids is fucking dead dead dead.

I know this is probably counter-productive. I know it is unrealistic. I know that I can't possibly kill the people who did this without killing hundreds, even thousands of people who didn't, and I know that the emotions it brings about in me are both racist and militant--two of the principal things I am trying to combat. But the funny thing is, I'm not kidding. If only for a moment, and if only in a part of me that sits way deep down and yet will never, and should never, be completed covered-up, I really do want this. If given a gun, and the two men who ran ducked out from under those bleachers with their gym bags left to put an end to the second half, of course I could kill them. I would want to, and I would revel in it.

And afterwords, after the blood clotted and ran cold and after mine stopped boiling and returned to tepid, I would realize that someone got what they wanted. Someone wanted a reaction. Certainly the Times wanted a reaction--God knows they needed something besides the mundane killings and the routine kidnappings to attract reader attention. But they obviously weren't alone. People don't blow up soccer-playing kids out of spite. Yes, crimes like that may be hate-motivated, but even hate-crimes, really are just calls for attention. This one was a politically-motivated, relgiously-driven, calculated effort to attract attention and elicit a response. And ultimately, it worked. They got a response from me; and they probably got one from thousands, maybe millions of other people like me around the world. And why? Because it was kids. Because it was soccer. Because they were so innocent and the killers so ruthless. And why were the killers so ruthless? I guess it just turned out that, when they killed policemen and soldiers and took shop-owers captive and occasionally blew up a fruit-stand, people just didn't seem to even notice.

So where am I now? Where now, does my blame fall? I guess the same place it fell before--on us, for being callous, and immune, and numb. And my sympathy?....with the devil.