speaking about my silence as a smart way of breaking it :))
my silence is currently me
punctuated by comments that I post here and there on the blogs about matters that get to me
so much is getting to me lately that I lack the energy to write them all :D
it just takes a weight off when someone hits one of those matters so I cheer and post a heartfelt comment
it helps reduce that long list
something I came across yesterday as I was browsing along, a statistical summary- by all means a summary of our 17 year "guerre d'avant" epoch as it appeared in news media in November 1990, namely NY Times, Le Monde and Boston Globe
"... had seen 150,000 people dead, 198,000 wounded, 17,500 disappeared and a total of 3,641 car bombs ... "
17 years in one figure-full line, a count of those humans who still don't seem to have counted in our "collective memory" as Laure expressed it, as we still seem to allow that counter to keep turning, true some still count when it's politically suitable and politically in to use their deaths for propaganda, as it is so well expressed in Marc's text here below:
"La culture de la mort au Liban est tout autre, elle est démagogie, elle est provocation, elle est refus de l’instant présent, elle est l’occasion de brandir des drapeaux symboles du morcellement du pays, elle est fanatisme."
A count of people who never did count in political considerations but who counted and still do count for those who miss and mourn them, a count of people who probably count on us to learn something and make a change, to stop that destructive settlement of accounts that is finally only increasing the "numbers" on that counter, so that it all ends up being reduced into a tiny paragraph of countless losses.
Wish I could find that caricature I saw once, a few years back, probably in the Time Magazine, it was poignantly expressive, it displayed an endless memorial wall where an infinite list of dead soldier's names was engraved and the first name said to the second:
"McNamara said that the Vietnam war was a mistake ... Pass it on"
