Imagine there's no countries...

Take five minutes and play along, won’t you?

Imagine your neighborhood. Do you live on a street lined with other houses? An apartment complex? A trailer park? Do you know many of your neighbors? Do you visit each other’s houses, or do you perhaps just know your neighbors by sight? Do you know their names or the names of their children?

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that you know your neighbors like I do. Next door, on the east, there’s Jeremy and his wife Karen, their 2-year-old boy Jaxton, and their drooling bulldog Titus. On the west side there is a couple in their 30’s, a blended family with a new baby. I don’t know their names. Across the street is an older woman living with her daughter, a single mom, and her granddaughter who looks to be about five years old. I don’t’ know their names either. I could go on describing the occupants of most of the houses on my street. We don’t know them personally, but we wave, perhaps have a brief conversation in the summer when everyone is outside.

Now think about your neighbors. Are they married? Do they have elderly parents living with them? Just think about the occupants. You don’t need to know them personally for this exercise.

Now, depending on the size of your street, complex etc., randomly pick ten houses. Pick ten of the families that surround you. If you don’t have that many, then pick half of the homes closest to you. Think about the people who live there.

Now burn these houses down, with those people inside. Burn them to the ground, no one escapes. How many people just died? How many children burned alive? How many elderly? How many young couples embarking on a new life together?

Are you picturing it? The death, the pain, the heartache? How much carnage is there? Can you see the bodies from your house? Can you smell the burning flesh? Try to imagine the destruction of the home next door to yours, burned to ground. Try to wrap your mind around what it must have been like for your neighbors inside that home. Repeat this process for nine other homes.

Now think about the ripple effect that those deaths would cause. The parents of that young couple. The grandparents of those dead children. The brothers, sisters, aunts and uncles. The friends…

How much grief and suffering would consume your newly destroyed neighborhood? How many lives would be forever changed and irrevocably destroyed by the lives lost in those ten houses? How many mothers would never recover from the loss of a daughter? How many fathers, the loss of a son? How many children would mourn their elderly parents? Lives snuffed out in an instant, recklessly, carelessly. Now repeat this process in a new neighborhood, with new sets of houses and new sets of families.

Pretend the country responsible for all this pain was Canada. Pretend Canada envisioned itself your savior, embarking on a quest to save you from yourselves. Pretend Canada invaded our country, burning down house after house, neighborhood after neighborhood. Pretend Canada, in all its arrogance, decided that the children in your neighborhood were a necessary sacrifice, a means to an end, if you will. And while Canada thinks it’s all very sad, they believe your neighborhood will be the better for it on down the road, sometime, if there is anybody left on down the road. Canada didn’t ask you, or your neighbors. And they still don’t. Canada knows what’s best for you, and if a few hundred thousand of your friends and family members have to die in the process of forcing upon you what Canada has decided is best, then so be it. Canada has decided that it’s worth it.

Now, pretend you live in Iraq.

By different estimations, there have been some 300,000 – 600,000 lives burned to the ground in Iraq, give or take a few thousand. Let’s use the conservative number of 300,000. Three hundred thousand is a hard number to wrap your mind around. It’s easier and far more personal if you limit your imagination to your own neighborhood. We hear it on the news every night but it’s not personal to us. They’re not really people, just numbers. Three hundred thousand human lives snuffed out since we invaded Iraq. Three hundred thousand people who would still be alive, going to their jobs, loving their families, just doing what people do, had we not invaded their country.

Yesterday, the United Nations put out a report that puts the Iraqi civilian death toll at 34,000…for the year of 2006. Thirty four thousand. For one year. How many people is 34,000? I don’t know. Would that be the equivalent of two Rolling Stones audiences? How about the Super Bowl audience? Americans just can’t grasp a number like that. So we don’t.

This will not only be George Bush’s legacy, it will be our legacy also. That's assuming we are around long enough, as a country, to have a legacy. Someone will be held accountable for all the moms, all the dads, and all the children. These were human souls. Their lives were not lost, they were taken.

There is nothing we could possibly achieve in Iraq that will make those deaths forgivable. We are war criminals, and no good that comes out of this atrocity will be worth all the innocent lives that have been sacrificed while we, as a country, continue to argue, bitch, and moan about who was right and who was wrong. We will be judged as a country. We will be punished as a country.

One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all...

UPDATE: You know all those Iraqi souls you can’t put a price on? Apparently I was wrong, you CAN put a price on them. It appears the going rate for a human life these days is about $2,500. That’s generally what the US government pays the families of civilians we “accidentally kill”, give or take a few dollars. Man, woman, child. $2,500. No wonder it’s so easy. Iraqi lives are barely worth the price of a flat screen TV.

From June, 2006: The U.S. military recently announced in a Defense Department report provided to Congress that it paid out $19 million in compensation to Iraqis last year – half of which paid out by Marines in al-Anbar province west of Baghdad.

The military claimed the amount was paid in 600 separate incidents, but it is common knowledge in Iraq that the usual payout for a non-combat civilian death is $2,500.

A payment of $19 million compensation at $2,500 a person would suggest such killings in thousands.

And from CNN, there is a new video report out today. Look for the video titled “US pays $2,500 for each dead by-stander” or “Condolence pay”.

So, those kids who play next door to you? Slap a $2,500 price tag on their heads. Hell, for that matter, slap one on your own kid’s head. And you wife’s. And your dad’s. And yours…