US$789,000,000,000 etc. US$600,000,000,000, and finding a way to heal the past and the present

Posted by Benjamin on: 02.13.2009 /

  Whis week the news of the passage of the $US 789 Billion Dollar “Stimulus Packge” approved by the U.S. government reminded me of something that’s kind of been out of my mind since Obama took office.  Do you remember this counter from Costofwar.com?

Yeah. That first big number in the title of this post reminded me of that second big number. And also of some other numbers I haven’t thought about lately–like the ongoing death toll in Iraq

Lily Hamourtziadou writes in her This Week In Iraq column:

Both the Americans and the Iraqis need to hold those responsible for the deaths of thousands of people accountable. In America and in Iraq, those who dropped bombs on innocent civilians, those who planted roadside bombs, those who placed bombs in markets, those who kidnapped and tortured to death people from the ‘other side’… all those killers should be brought to justice. For the deaths of nearly 100,000 Iraqi civilians. For the deaths of over 4,000 American soldiers. For those who are still meeting violent deaths.

As President Obama takes office, there is wide-spread optimism, there is hope that the old way of seeing the world in good/evil terms and the old readiness to use military force are a thing of the past. But not everything can be a thing of the past –the past and its ghosts can never go away until the dead, and all those to whom they mattered, get the justice and the closure they deserve.

One wonders as Obama leads the U.S. to move out of Iraq over the next 2 years (assuming this happens) what the aftermath will be in the next 5, 10, 50 years? How is Vietnam doing today, some 34 years after the U.S. left there? How *would* they be doing, if the U.S. had never gone into Southeast Asia? How many kids in Laos died last year from UXO left by our military back then? Does it mean anything that 87 people were violently killed in Iraq this week by the use of bombs and guns and so forth, including an 8 year old killed by U.S. gunfire? How does one think about that and at the same time think about our government spending over a trillion dollars on an “economic bailout”. I can’t wrap my head around these numbers–any of them. They seem to lose all meaning in their scale or in their horror, or both.

Did the U.S. ever apologize for the 2-4 million civilian deaths during the Vietnam War? Would there be any point to such an apology?

One wonders if there ought not be some sort of thing here in the U.S. modeled on South Africa’s truth and reconciliation commission. Something, perhaps, that Vietnam vets could take part in, as well as Iraq War vets. As well as the politicians who sent them. As well as those of us who more or less stood by, spending our US$45,000 per person per year.

Maybe we should just agree to spend all the money intended for an “economic bailout” on helping the 2 billion people in the world who live on $2 a day or less, and let the chips fall where they may here in our economy.  Or maybe, as Martin points out, collapse is inevitable, and thus the sooner the better.  Do empires fall partially because the weight of their sins becomes too great?

In the midst of that long string of questions, I wonder what you, or I, have done to help someone out today? And whether the accumulation of the smallish answers to that smallish question compares at all, in terms of weightiness, to the answers to all those previous questions?

Your thoughts?

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