"Butchered blond woman found with slit throat" cried the Sydney Morning Herald, in blond coloured tears.
But the 100,000s of Iraqis who have died are called "insurgents" and it is left at that.
I'll stand on a box and shout at the masses of people cramped to overflow as they wait on station platforms for trains that never come —
I'll shout to you the gruesome description of
each
and every
single
bloated and burning,
dead and decomposing body
discarded on a bombed Iraqi street,
until you are sick in your stomach and can't stand it anymore.
For each no longer living-running-joking-laughing body in Iraq,
there is another 100 mourning painfully,
retching their stomaches out onto the floor, seeing black everywhere for the hole in their heart of loved ones gone.
And for each body there is a hundred wounded, lost some part of their body,
so that they are half people.
One day buying a cigarette.
Next day a half person.
Next day paralysed.
Next year (when the media has forgotten), cancer.
Or a new disease.
For each body there is a home (since they were born, they played there) turned to disarrayed bricks and dust on wind.
There is a road with a giant hole.
There is electricity, failing, for days on end.
There is hunger.
There is soiled water.
This is a hundred exhausted families turned refugees in their own country,
biding their time in grave-like tent cities.
For each body there is a foreign kid,
punished with army service cos he couldn't get a job in the fashionable world of downsizing,
now shaking and not ever sleeping, with PTS disorder
And for each body,
there is another body locked up in Abu Ghraib prison.
Raped repeatedly if female,
and if its not.
The body slumps in the corner, exploded bomb noises replaying in her ears. She is there for defending her home against an intruder. Or for being somewhere nearby.
For each body there is money —
lots and lots of green American money
for someone who inherited the company from his dad when he was 25, and now invests in gun and construction stocks.
Tamara Pearson
From Green Left Weekly, December 1, 2004.
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