Priorities

Recent Headlines:

Saturday May 3: Bush seeks $770 Million in World Food Aid for the coming year.

Saturday May 3: Bush seeks $70 Billion dollars to fund the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into next spring

Thursday May 1: U.S. airstrike kills 2 women and 2 children in Sadr City, Baghdad--part of the 65 civilians violently killed in Iraq on Thursday.

Here's what the numbers look like: for fighting hunger: $770,000,000. For killing Iraqis: $70,000,000,000. Civilian deaths in Iraq in April: 1,320, INC. 58 CHILDREN
122 CIVILIANS WERE KILLED BY US FORCES

So if we let C represent the children, and I represent the Iraqi civilians directly killed by U.S. forces in April, then it looks like this:

CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCC
and
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII
IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

(Now if you cut and paste all those letters into a word document or an email, and then delete them, you can create a sort of typographical metaphor for their deaths. And deleting them will probably cause you just about as much real grief as their actual deaths. Because they're over there, and it's just too hard to actually get enough of any sort of real sense of connection to empathize on a real level. This of course must be true, because if it *was* possible, then we wouldn't continue, as a culture, to kill people at the rate we've been killing them since the 1940's. But we do continue. QED.)

But... God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him will not perish, but have everlasting life. So it's all okay. Don't stress about it, whatever you do.

And if any shocking preacher from Chicago should call on God to damn America, make sure to shout him down very very loudly for saying such a heretical horrifying outrageous thing. Especially if he suggests that the government who did this to Nagasaki, killing 80,000 civilians, could be capable of creating this virus. In that case he should be forever outlawed from polite society, and roundly denounced by one and all. Because we're a *Christian* nation! And therefore by definition we aren't terrorists. QED.

(Benjamin--do I sense a little anger?)