Defining Loss

Certain things are expected from war. We don’t want to hear about them, of course, unless it is in the form of hero-laden cinema, but we know they happen. We accept those losses, as well as we understand them, because of what we are told by bumper stickers and talking heads about freedom not being free. We accept them as if it is our sacrifice to make, as if it is out streets made into war zones, our neighbors terrified to leave their homes to buy bread. We assess, and we find it acceptable.

As far as the average American spectator is concerned, we have not yet passed the line of what is acceptable. Sure we see the young men and women dying far from home, far from their mothers, far from long lives and grandchildren, but we again find that a worthy price to pay. Again, not too much. Again, as if it is our sacrifice, our blood on the ground. We call them patriots. We don’t call them lambs.

Today, buried among the reports of NCAA office pool picks and Kevin Federline, the American spectator may find the report out of Balad, Iraq giving the sketchy yet disturbing details of a raid on the house of a suspected Al-Qaeda insurgent. Dig a little deeper, take a look at the European press, and you may find Associated Press pictures of the bodies of the people living in that house, of the at least four children and two women shot in the head, hands bound. You may even discover that the youngest occupant of what is now a pile of rubble was only seven months old.

Should you read these articles, you may brush it off as propaganda, you may disregard the reports from neutral press outlets telling of the wailing in the streets, the women rubbing ash in their hair, of tiny coffins and outraged citizens. You may be able to look past this. This too may seem acceptable.

No one is calling our servicemen and women monsters. They aren’t, as a whole, murderers or madmen. They are normal people in an impossible situation trying to make it from dawn to dusk in one piece.

What we are asking, what I am asking, is when are these losses no longer acceptable. At what point do we stop tolerating dead troops, dead civilians, dead mothers found still holding their dead children. When is the loss no longer acceptable, when does it become simply a loss? When do we learn the long hard lesson that revolution, democracy, social change itself must come from the very people expected to make that change?

In war, people die. Good people, bad people, bystanders and insurgents, they all are in the ever widening line of fire. But the thing that makes the biggest dent in the very core of the sort of dangerous fundamentalism that makes people strap bombs to their chest is when society defines what is acceptable. Our job as a world power is to make that distinction, to spell out what it is that we will and will not do in the name of any cause.

No, freedom is not free. But freedom is unachievable if it is bought with the souls and principles of the very people who are charged with delivering it.