Yet Another Iraq War Casualty

While those of us in Chapel Hill are keeping our eyes open for the "person of interest" whose image was captured by a surveillance camera at the ATM where he attempted to use Eve Carson's bankcard after her killing, all of us should note that a suspect has been apprehended in the nearly contemporaneous murder of another college co-ed, Lauren Burk, of Auburn University. The mother of the suspect in the Burk case was quoted in a March 10, 2008 Associated Press story as describing her son as an Iraq war veteran who "was changed" after his service. If this is true, he is one of many--changed not for the better but for the worse. And this would make Lauren Burk, like the other victims of violence perpetrated both at home and in Iraq by current and former U.S. military personnel, a casualty of the Iraq war and of the culture of violence that both spawned and perpetuates it. Of course, she will not be listed in the government's official tallies of the dead and wounded. The Plutocratic War Party never takes responsibility for its actions or for the consequences of its actions. Let us not "re-litigate" the reasons for going to war, say its advocates. Re-litigate? How can you re-litigate something that has yet to be properly litigated in the first place? Lies, lies, lies, lies, mass murder, and now the blow-back of mass murder upon more innocents. When will we wake up to the carnage we have brought upon others and upon ourselves? How much blood is enough? The PWP's vampires are insatiable. Their self-righteousness impenetrable. Their dishonesty unfathomable. Their greed inexhaustible. And their patsies in the general public, at least those who write in to their local papers about the recent crimes at Auburn and UNC, want more blood: Arm the professors! Warm-up the electric chair! What we want are orgies of blood, not an end to its shedding--all protests to the contrary. When will we say, "Let it end here. Let it end now"? When? I grieve for the victims. I grieve for the perps. I grieve that we have all come to this most tragic of places: where lives are cheap and hearts are hard and minds insensible to the savagery that we have come to accept as the "cost of doing business" in the world today.