Heartwrenching Reality

The following is a paragraph from BagNewsNotes that sums up the tragedy of one day --yesterday, July 21,2005. Michael Shaw is a writer, psychologist, cartoonist -- and the man behind the BAG, a website with four missions , one of which is to analyze the news and advertising images we see around us and explore how they influence the way we think about them. This one paragraph, with the accompanying photo, reflects the terrible, heartwrenching reality Iraqis and Americans are facing in a world created by Bush's imperial arrogance.

After two years of this slow-motion cataclysm, I never saw a week like this last one. With the growing Iraqi rapprochement with the Iranians, and the murder of the Sunni delegates to the commission working on the new constitution, and the dismal new Pentagon report about the profoundly insufficient capabilities and prospects for Iraq's defense forces, and the constitution draft that sends woman's rights back to the stone age, and the killing of the Egyptian ambassador, and two horrific large-scale suicide attacks, it's hard to imagine a worse picture.
So, of all the bad days yesterday, nothing compares to what happened to Jalil Shaalan and his family in the Amarayah district of Baghdad. Jalil, a security guard, was gunned down in front of his wife and children by unknown assailants just outside of the school he was employed to protect. I mean, what the hell are we doing?