"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
My Boog Pages
Wednesday, January 21
The Only Name You Need To Know
There's been a lot of bad names tossed about over the Iraq War. Opponents have called George W. Bush a "cowboy" or "chickenhawk", while supporters have responded with the "Axis of Weasel" and the "Coalition of the Pissy". But in my opinion, one name is all you need to know, the name of a young woman who died forty years ago next March.
Kitty Genovese.
Just after 3am on the morning of March 13th, 1964, Catherine "Kitty" Genovese was returning to her Queens apartment from her job managing a bar. She'd parked her red Fiat and was walking to her apartment when she noticed a man following her. She fled, he pursued. She couldn't outrun him, and in three separate attacks over the next half hour, he repeatedly stabbed her, finally killing her in the vestibule of her apartment building.
Thirty-eight of her neighbors saw or heard part of the attack. None tried to intervene. Someone finally called the police more than half an hour after Kitty was first stabbed - after she was already dead.
Plenty of people saw what was going on. No one tried to help.
I know that many people say that America shouldn't try to play "GloboCop", shouldn't go in where we're not wanted, shouldn't interfere in other countries' affairs. But "I was afraid I might get hurt" isn't a good excuse. If we know what's going on, and we're able to help, we should. We wouldn't let a madman get away with murdering hundreds of thousands of Americans. Why should we let him kill his own people?
Put it another way: what if Adolph Hitler had confined himself to butchering the Jews (and others, of course) within his own borders, and had never invaded Poland, not to mention France, Russia, or any of the other countries the Nazis overran? What if Dachau and Buchenwald (both in Germany) existed, but Auschwitz or Treblinka (in Poland) never had? Would we have been justified in going to war based on those offenses alone?
I say yes. I say yes despite the black eyes we've suffered (Somalia), despite the times we haven't answered the bell (Rwanda), despite the bad guys who still get to thumb their noses at us (North Korea). I believe that this nation was founded on ideals, and we have to do our best to live up to them.
Or, to quote an Australian who supported the war, "I wish we'd had politicians in the 1930s with the guts of Tony Blair and John Howard ... Because then I'd have a lot more relatives."
