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The Meaning of One Thousand
By Tai Moses, AlterNet
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What is 1,000? It is an iconic number that gives the media a fresh prism through which to view the war. One thousand, said political scientist David Birdsell, "is a gripping number, a large number, a tragic number, and it will be a pivot to revisit Bush's reasons for fighting the war." The Houston Chronicle called it "a bloody threshold." Of course, 999 is just as bloody. And no sooner was the toll of 1,000 announced than it became obsolete, with more fatalities bringing the actual number to 1,006 by Friday morning.
The arithmetic serves its symbolic purpose; yet we tend to be far more moved by the story of a single individual than by the numbers. The Pentagon has not yet released the name of the soldier who had the grim honor of being the 1,000th to die in Iraq. All we know of him is that he was with the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas, and he died fighting in the streets of Baghdad. He has a name and a story, and we are all diminished by his death.
Why is a picture worth 1,000 words? Because an image can make the abstraction of death vanish. On Thursday, the New York Times published an extraordinary photo gallery of most of the Americans killed in Iraq. Given faces and names, the dead cease to be "military personnel" or "troops," and are restored to their rightful places as sons and daughters, fathers, mothers, husbands and wives.
According to the Times, the youngest service member to die was 18-year-old Private Leslie Jackson of Richmond, VA., killed on May 20. She joined the Army at 17. In the words of her grieving mother, "she was a sweet child."
Nadia McCaffrey's son, Patrick, from Tracy, Calif., lost his life in Iraq three months ago. She told the San Francisco Chronicle that coping with his loss is "harder every day ... and frankly I don't think this is going to end until I die."
What is 1,000?
In Japan, 1,000 paper cranes has become a worldwide symbol of peace, demonstrating the power of a single person to create change. According to Japanese myth, the gods will grant the wish of one who folds 1,000 paper cranes.
There is a website called One Thousand Reasons, which categorizes (by issue, alphabetically or chronologically) 1,000 failures of the Bush presidency.
More than 1,000 days have passed since the World Trade Center towers fell. In essence, for each day since then, the president has sacrificed the life of an American service member. We are fed the detritus of 9/11, the fear and the paranoia, day after day, but in that battered memory there is no nourishment for our nation.
Standing by the lake, surrounded by my neighbors, I felt a sense of solidarity, but I felt something else too; the stirrings of deep anger. Americans and Iraqis are dying horrific deaths every day, and we who want peace are not doing enough.
Some Americans who are starting to get angry enough to do something are the military families. Brooke Campbell, whose 25-year-old brother, Ryan, was killed in Iraq in April, wrote in a lacerating letter to George W. Bush, "Not only did you cheat him of a long meaningful life, but you cheated him of a meaningful death."
Ruby Savage's grandson, Jeremiah, died in Fallujah on May 12. Here's what she thinks of 1,000: "I'm mad, just plain mad,'' she told her local paper, The Tennessean. ''We're ready for them all to come home, and not in a box, either. I don't know how much higher it will go. I can't tell, but it's senseless. It hurts."
When the 45 minutes were up, people quietly snuffed out their candles and turned to look at each other. Rueful smiles were offered, farewells exchanged, and slowly, the crowd dispersed, melting into the darkness.
As the significance of 1,000 fades, the death toll will cease to be front page news. One thousand means nothing – as in, it is a terrible thing to die for nothing. And 1,000 means everything – everything that is at stake.
One thousand candles, 1,000 coffins. More than 7,000 troops wounded. As for the 11,000 Iraqi dead and ten times that many injured, there aren't enough candles in this city to commemorate them. Our anguish at this appalling loss of life is the appropriate response. It should not be our only response.
Tai Moses is a contributing editor of AlterNet.