The Woman Who Could Have Been Me

[chiburb]

I normally point folks to Plaid Adder's column via the Editorials forum, but this one deserves the wider audience of GD. It also reminds me of the one question I've been asking since the invasion began:
Why is an Iraqi life worth any less than an American life?

Snip:

13 months later it still strikes me, the unbearable injustice of geography, the brutal juxtapositions of globalization. I could have been born in Iraq 35 years ago instead of in the US and my life would have been completely different. I'm sitting here in a clean office with working power and a relatively new computer typing in thoughts that have been shaped by a Godawful number of years of higher education, with a view of blue skies and green grass out my window.

Somewhere else, at exactly this moment, a 35 year old woman who could have been me is watching American bombs shatter the city she grew up in. That woman is not going to go home tonight, as I will, and make one of the five relatively simple dishes she knows how to cook and listen to the Cubs game while she does the dishes and waits for her partner to call and tell her about the first day of the conference she's attending.

That woman will be searching through the rubble for signs of her family, or helping her neighbors carry their dead out to one of the new makeshift cemeteries, or lying pinned where she fell by fallen masonry. That woman does not deserve the hell that her life is right now any more than I have ever done anything to deserve mine.

Injustice is the currency of the global economy. This is just how it is. I know that, but my heart refuses to understand, and it keeps rejecting the knowledge. I get tired of having it hit me every time like a new blow that leaves a new bruise. But what I'm really afraid of is that I will accept it, and stop believing that things could ever be different.

More here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/plaidder/04/20.html

[Plaid Adder]

1. Thanks, chiburb!

Always a trooper.

I wasn't planning to write one this week, but somehow I looked at the pictures on CNN and about an hour later I had a column.

:argh:

The Plaid Adder

[chiburb]

3. No, thank you....

I sent this to my daughters and others because it was written from the heart (and touched mine).

[GreenPartyVoter]

2. Yep. Been thinking similar thoughts myself. Especially as a mom.

What if my kids were bombed? What would my boys do if hubby and I died? Where would they go and who would take care of them?

[linazelle]

4. This was what broke my heart about the war last March...

Before I found DU, I was all over the internet arguing with freepers who couldn't understand that the Iraqis were just like us. The Plaid Adder says what I was trying to say then and still feel now.

This is even more significant as the Fallujah attacks continue. I woke up this morning thinking about the people who had been told a week or so ago to leave their homes during the cease fire. I found myself thinking what would I do if I were told to leave my home immediately. What would I take? Would I leave or would I stay to protect my life's belongings in hopes that I'd be missed in the crossfire? I know many there have chosen to stay because they have nowhere else to go. How do you leave a home destined for nowhere but the streets in front of you? It's tragic.

[lcooksey]

7. A family in Baghdad

Anyone touched by Plaid Adder's column this week should check out http://afamilyinbaghdad.blogspot.com/. It's really poignant.

[chiburb]

5. Kick for the lunch crowd... n/t

.

[linazelle]

6. KICK