Common Thread

A friend of mine showed me a recent post on Riverbend's blog, 'Baghdad Burning'. It's called "Thank You For the Music" (which is about the sudden loss of a good friend to the daily violence in Iraq) . Riverbend lives in Iraq and blogs about her personal experiences and life in general in US occupied Iraq. Reading it, I couldn't help but be reminded of all the touching and kind tributes to Bryan Harvey and his family that I have read in the last couple of weeks. It's a great post and reading it evoked a strange mixture of emotions, but I was left with this thought: Coping with the events of the first week of January gave us here in our little part of the world just the tiniest taste of what it must be like to live in a place like Iraq, where senseless, anonymous and brutal violence take the lives of scores ordinary people on a nearly daily basis. Or Pakistan, where a recent botched CIA attempt to kill a Bin Laden crony resulted in the deaths of 17 ordinary people. Imagine the anger and bewilderment that we're feeling here...then multiply that by about a thousand.