Iraq Toll

I was working at the DOD medical school, otherwise known as the Uniformed Services University for the Health Sciences (USUHS), prior to, and after the “shock and awe” bombing of Baghdad. All on staff and faculty were both “shocked and awed” while feelings of dread and foreboding set in. Many of us had seen films of battlefields in Afghanistan where field medicine was practiced by USUHS graduates, and knew what American casualties would look like, and what the high likelihood of lower limb amputations would be considering the the insurgents’ use of roadside or implanted explosive devices. And sure enough, Bethesda Naval Hospital and Walter Reed Army Hospital would soon be filled with these amputees, young men AND women, who had had high hopes for the life awaiting them, and now, reduced by the Bush Administration’s bunglings, to barely half of what they had once been.

The Bush Administration led by The Great Decider, to supply the needs of His ego, dragged this country into an unwarranted war, presumably to unseat a mad dictator and to restore peace and freedom to a country plagued by fear and submission. Oil, of course, had nothing to do with this decision, and the American Congress and the voters who installed them, fell, like sheep into line to do the The Decider’s bidding.

Here we are now, on the eve of another election, still fighting the war that cannot be won, hemorrhaging billions of dollars to support it, while our infrastructure crumbles, our economy limps along to support an unsupportable war effort while failing to support those veterans who paid the price of that war, education for our young people adequate to forestall future attempts to numb their young minds staggers to teach them the mere basics, and the electorate is likewise numbed by American Idol, Biggest Loser and “reality” shows that substitute for the Real Reality of our lives as the Seduced and Abandoned Generation.

And who, in fact, are The Biggest Losers?