Collateral Damage

Jesus Christ or Genghis Kahn....Who's footsteps are we really following?

Collateral damage.

Sounds reasonable, acceptable, and even unavoidable to the military minded among us. But what is it exactly? It is the cost in nonmilitary casualties to innocently involved people during military confrontations. It is the cost in lives of unsuspecting women and children blown to bits in shopping malls or on subway trains and in markets when extremists seek to make a political statement. It is the cost in families dislocated to relief centers because their homes have been commandeered by military personnel in war zones, or to those whose homes have disappeared altogether from bomb strikes. It is the economic cost to countries whose infrastructure has been destroyed; manufacturing centers, roads and bridges, power facilities and grids, and commerce centers all disabled or destroyed by combatants during military campaigns. This destruction is a result of goals which are completely irrelevant to the people whose lives are being destroyed by the “ruling” elite who supposedly speak for the people they govern.

Does this still sound reasonable? Millions of people dislocated, hundreds of thousands of people dead, trillions of dollars of money wasted on the megalomaniac dreams and ambitions of a few deranged individuals? And I do mean a few. Less than a hundred powerful sheiks (similar to Mafia families) in Iraq are being propped up by a few hundreds of legislators in this country, in support of a few thousand businessmen. These “elite” are costing the rest of the world hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of current and future dollars, and generations of grief.

And for what? I personally have nothing against a single Iraqi or Muslim. In fact, I don’t even know one. I feel certain that the poor civilian, who has lost a family member to this war (every family in Iraq has lost, on average, at least one) has nothing against me. Where is the sanity?

Wouldn’t it make a lot more sense to turn a biblical eye to the damage caused to us during the 9/11 disaster? Instead of recovering from the disaster, haven’t we, in fact, more than doubled it -- just in lives lost? If we add the cost of the physically maimed and mentally diminished, and the cost in taxpayer dollars of a devastated economy, haven’t we caused ourselves infinitely more damage than the “enemy” could have ever managed? With no end to the damage in sight! Where is the sanity in a policy like this?

And to think my fellow Americans are considering voting for more of the same, for shame. And to think this is being done in the name of one of the foremost pacifists to ever place his saintly foot upon this planet…none other than Jesus Christ himself. It seems to me we do Genghis Kahn honor in the name of our savior.