this diary is dedicated to all who suffer because of war and other disasters
we honor courage in all its forms
we love and support our troops, just as we love and support the Iraqi people – without exception, or precondition, or judgement.
cross-posted at DailyKos, Booman Tribune, European Tribune, My Left Wing, and TexasKaos.
image and poem below the fold
Children of Sunni families play inside a refugee camp near Falluja, 50 km (30 miles) west of Baghdad July 14, 2006. Hundreds of displaced Sunni families, who fled the Shi’ite neighbourhood in Baghdad, are now living in a former tourism housing complex turned into a refugee camp near Falluja, a Sunni dominated city. The number of displaced people in Iraq has swelled by 150,000 since the bombing of a Shi’ite shrine in February pushed the country to the brink of civil war, a United Nations agency said recently. Picture taken July 14, 2006.
REUTERS/Mohanned Faisal (IRAQ)
from A Prayer for my Daughter
by W. B. Yeats
Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack- and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.
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Posted by James Wolcott
Yesterday, on one of the network news broadcasts (I was channel surfing so fast I’m not sure which of the big three it was), there was a report on the civilian reaction in Beirut to the attacks which showed a young Lebanese mother in headscarve, who with her children had fled from their home to safe haven, arguing that they–Hezbollah–should return the two soldiers, it wasn’t worth all the misery that was being inflicted on everyone. Whereupon a burly older man, hearing her criticism, bulled forward and angrily reprimanded, asking (demanding) to know why she was talking this way to the press, and displaced her in the camera frame to hold forth and spout defiance-militance-whatever.
It was an instructive moment, the male prerogative chestily asserting and inserting itself, and a dramatic reminder that although wars and organized violence have their social-national-ethnic-religious-tribal vectors, they are also brute expressions of patriarchal force…male arrogance and insanity sheathed in metal. The mother was sensibly, rationally decrying the cost of conflict on the lives of her children and other civilians, while the older man (a stranger? a relative?–it wasn’t clear) was trying to squelch such talk as ignorant and disloyal. He was the stand-in for every other male blowhard (on every side of the debate) who thinks he knows best and loves to hear himself talk tough. Meanwhile, the children are weeping, or being pulled in bloody pieces out of smoking debris.
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support a young heart with an old soul peace takes courage (multimedia)
witness every day
