From Andrew Sullivan yesterday:

“Imagine that this kind of massacre happened every day. Imagine a police force that was far too small to even respond to most of them. Imagine this occurring repeatedly for years until the perpetrators and their accomplices became the de facto power-brokers throughout the land. Imagine the shootings also being accompanied by the brutal torture of victims. Imagine families never having finality on whether their own siblings or parents or children have been murdered or not.

This is Iraq today. Now think of the justified rage many feel at the VT campus police chief and university president for misjudgments. Now imagine them presiding over several more massacres in the same place. Ask yourself: why do we not feel as enraged by those responsible for security in Iraq? Are those victims not human beings too? Are they not children and mothers and fathers and sons? Are we not ultimately responsible for them, having destroyed the institutions of order in their country? Now go watch John Bolton tell the victims to go help themselves.

And I’ll take it one place further. Listening to Morning Edition, which has been some of the tamest and least impulsive reporting on the shooting, had short profiles of the victims. The NY Times and I’m sure a hundred other papers have a growing collection of photos of the victims. People probably need to see this sort of thing. It is a response which has been measured before and this human interest angle is one of the crucial angles that lets people fully understand the magnitude of such an event. Additionally I have been interested in how the narrative takes on a life of its own as well, specifically media driven – with leading questions and a magnetism towards the cliches we assume drive such violent actions. We, as a culture, like things to fit into boxes even if they don’t, and long before we could possibly know if they ever truly will or should. (see: religion)

BUT

Andrew Sullivan is very right. And he is one of the only ones saying this that I have stumbled upon. And most will not follow suit. What happens in Iraq every day is EXACTLY what happened to us on Monday. People need to understand that. But it happens so often that how could any media outlet in Iraq or anywhere keep track of the profiles of the dead. There is probably no record of many of the deaths, no remembrances, no candlelight vigils. I promise you that Prime Minister Malaki does not fly in for convocations. People die, and then later, more people die. Imagine every single citizen of this country knowing someone who had died in the VA-Tech shooting, because virtually every Iraqi citizen knows someone who has died since 2003. I would have to imagine that there are many people in Iraq, that if told of the event would probably respond: “Good. Now they know what it’s like here.” Certainly people die all over the world en-masse, especially in third world countries, and in numbers much larger than 32, but we don’t share a lot of direct responsibility for those. We may not even share much responsibility for the Virginia Tech shooting either. But Iraq is ours. Any way you look at it, these people would not be dying if it was not for us. The hundreds of thousands of dead would still be alive – maybe oppressed, but alive. Which would they choose if given that choice? Which would you choose?  (New Hampshire is on record I think) Add the thousands of US military deaths and other casualties to that pile, and I assure you we are not done yet in that regard. (Are soldiers innocent? No, but they offer their lives with the understanding that they are to be put at risk only if it is absolutely necessary – and I’m sorry but it wasn’t and it still isn’t)

Isn’t it a sort of ignorant hypocrisy to focus so much on our own grief and not on the grief our nation has caused? Are American college students more or less innocent than Sunni marketgoers? Would you rather die at the hand of a disturbed “loner” or an alienated zealot? Both are probably barely past childhood, both unimaginably warped by whatever forces, and the result is the same: They kill, and others ask how and why.

I don’t mean to politicize this, but I’m actually not. This is not about left or right, or war or not; it is about perspective. It is about American self centering. I just wish people could imagine this happening every single day, but without this response because no one has a response like this left in them. It’s been happening for years.