Freedom's Fidelity

Thursday, July 24, 2003

It's strange, the thought of seeing pictures of a dead human being makes me wince.... hard. Seeing pictures of a beat-up person has the same effect. Even seeing someone beat (especially Sopranos style) and/or killed in the movies puts a knot in my stomach. So I expected the same feeling as I prepared myself to view the postmortem pictures of Uday and Qusay Hussein. I looked at the pictures, I looked at the short video, but I never got that feeling, that feeling of finality, of sadness, and empathy for the man and the anguish his family must be feeling...... foiling their every attempt to distract themselves from it. That feeling never came to me, it was a relief, and it was telling. Uday and Qusay are not human. Sure any scientist worth his salt could prove to me that they are the same species as I. But in reality, no. They are monsters, monsters dressed in human skin. Monsters who demonstrated a ruthlessness so extreme, so cold, it was enough to build a house of fear inside the heart of every Iraqi citizen, while they lived royal lifestyles of sex, drugs, and rape. Uday and Qusay are gone and their reign of terror on the citizens of Iraq is finished.

I think of all the lives they ended and all the hopes and dreams these two men never allowed to come to fruition. How many people did they kill? Thousands? For sure, likely flirting with the hundred thousand mark, undoubtedly two of the most evil men to walk the planet in that last hundred years. So that is why I didn't get that human ache of seeing a fellow man dead, I look at them and I think of all the people that might have been killed or tortured, or might have lost a family member to one of them, but now won't. I look at them dead, at their twisted, swollen, battered faces and see nothing but life.

posted by Paul  permalink | |