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Ronnie Polaneczky | How do we look beyond
2,000 deaths?
THE WAR protesters were
scattered across the city last night like ashes of the dead sprinkled across
a hillside. At City Hall, on When I wasn't dabbing at
my tears or trying to swallow around the lump in my throat during the
candlelight vigil at City Hall's Dilworth Plaza (organized by Gold Star
Families for Peace and the Brandywine Peace Community, among other groups), I
kept thinking: The number of war dead has
gotten so bloated, it's dwarfing the individual
lives lost in George Bush's phony mission to ferret out weapons of mass
destruction. How can anyone get his
arms around 2,000 dead? Especially when our government won't even allow
photographs of soldiers' coffins flown into But when you look at the
numbers behind that 2,000 total (which, face it, is certain to
increase by the time this column sees print), the lives it represents become
more real, the fact of the deaths more tangible. Maybe that's why I've
become obsessed with the Brookings Institution's "Iraq Index" - a
weekly breakdown of statistics that put the numbers of this war into
shattering perspective. For example, of the
American troops killed since this quagmire began: • 573 were younger than 22 - babies,
really, yet old enough to dream of the future with eagerness and hope. • 244 were older than 35, old enough
to have donned adulthood's responsibilities, having spouses, children, proud positions of civic responsibility. • 557 were felled by improvised
explosive devices, 72 by rocket-propelled grenades and 93 by mortars and
rockets - you know, the kind of weapons so violent,
they practically guarantee a closed casket back home. • Our perished men and women hailed
from cities and large towns (26.2 percent), suburbs (40.5 percent) and rural
areas (33.3 percent). And they were especially vulnerable during November
2004; 137 soldiers were killed in that month alone. • They are joined in death by British
soldiers (98), non-Coalition troops (200) and Iraqi civilians whose numbers
careen wildly from 10,000 to 72,100 depending on the sources and
circumstances in the Iraq Index. • As these numbers have risen, so
have the number of insurgents in Which
seems like a lousy return on the investment of human life this country has
made in the name of ending terrorism. As for what our government
is spending on the war, the figure is now over $203 billion - a number
impossible to fathom all by its lonesome. Which is why I'm becoming
just as obsessed with data being crunched by the National Priorities Project
(it's slogan: Turning Data Into Action), whose wonks have figured out
that, here at home, $203 billion would allow: • 26 million children to attend Head
Start; • 121 million kids to be insured; • 3.5 million schoolteachers to be
hired; • Or 9.8 million students to attend
four-year public universities on scholarships. The NPP didn't note how
far $203 billion would go to rebuild Then again, so would
Wilma's. So now that we've
surpassed 2,000 deaths, where do we go from here? That question was answered
last night, loud and clear, at the rally I attended with several hundred
protesters who snarled rush-hour traffic beneath Billy Penn's feet. "Not one more death,
not one more dollar," they chanted. It doesn't take a
think-tank study to figure out how to accomplish that goal: Just bring our soldiers
home. E-mail polaner@phillynews.com
or call 215-854-2217. For recent columns: http://go.philly.com/polaneczky |
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