Monday, July 10, 2006

Fourteen

Think about when you were fourteen, for just a moment now. Brand new skinny freshman in high school, a bit nervous about the big time, knowing that your entire future may rest on the next 3 1/2 years. There's all these big beefy juniors and seniors around. You may be a little scared of some of them, big brutes, but you're in school, and the worst that is going to happen is a little hazing in the locker room. You go home, and you shoot baskets in the driveway or talk on the phone with your friends or go practice some sport or musical instrument or whatever your parents have devised to help you pass time in these pre-programmed days when everything is just so, and your biggest worry is that your zits are going to get worse and you'll be ugly for the school pictures.

Now imagine that you are held down by large armed men. These men shoot your father in the head before your horrified eyes. They rape you. They rape you until you are bloody, as you scream in horror and pain. Then they shoot you in your head, and mercifully when they set your body afire, you are already dead.

She was fourteen years old. She had a name -- Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi. She was just a girl. She no longer wonders what she will be doing in life. She no longer worries about math exams or zits or her instructor criticizing her when she makes a mistake playing the flute. She is dead. Dead dead dead. And nothing we do or say will ever change that.

If there is a Hell, a literal, figurative Hell... we are going there, my friends. We are going there. Because we let this happen, you and I (assuming you are an American like myself). Oh sure, we blather and blather and blather from the safety of our keyboards, we whine and make excuses to ourselves, "Oh, I can't do anything, Oh, I might lose my job, Oh, I might be homeless or sent to jail," oh yes we tell ourselves these things. And then we do nothing. Nothing but more blather. Nothing but more excuses to excuse ourselves for our sins of omission.

She was fourteen. She was fourteen, and she will never be fifteen.

We are so going to Hell.

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

6 comments:

  1. Damned babykillers. :-(

    The more things change, the more they stay the same. I could really do without some of the flashbacks to the 1960s. :-(

    Dave

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  2. The arrogance that it takes to perform such an atrocity comes from our countries determination to lay claim to being the freest and bravest of people.

    We are not.

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  3. We are the land of the cringing sheep cowards and home of the numbered and controlled from birth to death. But we prefer our delusions, our soothing lies, for they are comforting and tell us what we want to hear -- that we are a good people, that we are brave, that we are free.

    All we are free to do is blather. And that, only in government-approved locations, and only in government-approved manner. If we choose to blather in some way not government-approved, big beefy men come and take you away. Just ask that veteran from Veterans for Peace who was arrested in a VA cafe' the other day...

    -BT

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  4. Yet people do not see that BadTux, I am in constant amazement at how these people are in their own little word and see nothing but what they wish to see.

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  5. Keith Olberman's interview with John Dean: only 23% of us are the aristocrat-father figure loving, fall on a sword for my leader types. Add to that another 23% who want to do nothing and not have to care...

    See, I blather for myself, to keep up the old optimism; otherwise I'd just slit the wrists and be done with it!

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  6. SB Gypsy, I would say that probably 60% want to do nothing and don't want to care. Right now some of those 60% are starting to care, but that's because they're not *totally* delusional and can see that Good King George III is running the country into the ground. But basically, from what I can tell, roughly 3/4ths of the country either a) worships Dear Leader, or b) would prefer not to care, if there was any way around it. And of the remainder, most of us are too cowed to do anything except rant bravely from behind the safety of a computer keyboard. I'd say there's maybe 1% of Americans max who actually are doing something, and they're standing around saying, "Where is everybody?", and everybody carefully averts their eyes to make sure they don't see...

    - Badtux the Cynical Penguin

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