“A perfect day for a landing,” the news person on CNN-TV says.
How fragile our lives really are. Such a terrible tragedy! Seven lives lost and their families devastated. I hope our country’s leaders are deeply bothered by the fact that war would ratchet up that loss many thousandfolds — creating a much, much, greater tragedy.
In his announcement of the space shuttle tragedy, Bush winds up putting a major religious spin on his statement. Another tragedy for those of us religious non-believers who believe strongly that our secular leaders should refrain from insinuating their theism into their roles as government spokespeople.
It’s also a tragedy that more religious leaders — and purportedly religious government leaders — don’t share Andrew Greeley’s perspective:
It is also contended that a democratic regime in Iraq would open up the possibility for other democratic governments in the Arab world. Once cannot imagine a more absurd notion…
It may well be that Western style democracy is incompatible with Arab culture. Certainly an American style democracy imposed by force of arms in Iraq is not going to persuade Arabs that they should try to imitate such a regime….
One assembles all of these reasons, overt and covert, for war, considers them together and discovers that they are as thin a tissue paper…..
Many of these young men and women we have seen bidding tearful farewlls to their families certainly will die — thousands perhaps tens of thousands of them. Many Iraqs will die too, perhaps hundreds of thousands. Our leaders will be condemned all over the world as war criminals — which they sure would seem to be.
And a final tragedy cited today by Molly Ivins:
The U.S. now ranks 17th, below Costa Rica and Slovenia, on the worldwide index of press freedom established by the Reporters Withough Borders.
Why would any other country want to replicate the kind of corporate-sponsored non-democracy that we have here today in America?