"How can you ask someone to be the last to die... .?"

I find myself wondering if most Americans are so removed from this war that they don't have any real connection to it. It's as if we have achieved a kind of national scotoma, as if this war was happening to some other nation, that it was some other distant event being reported on the national news every night, as if it were some kind of really long sports story about a couple of teams no one really cares about. Tonight I am walking through Chelsea to the A train and I see the guys at Station Fourteen setting up their tree.

The NYFD lost 333 firefighters on 9/11, scores more are now dying from working in the Pit in the days and weeks after. We have allowed George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld to completely screw up our nation's response to the 9/11 attacks. The war in Iraq is a national disgrace, yet we don't seem, as a nation, disturbed or disgraced by it. I am walking with my camera in my hand listening in my headphones to James Baker of the Iraq Study Group declare that the conclusion of the report is that we can no longer stay the course. That there is great peril in continuing as we have these past four years, five years, whatever. But where is our peril?

I am nearly knocked over by a couple taking home their tree. and my eye is drawn across the street to the GAP store window. Where I see that corporate America has finally (maybe I missed it before?) co-opted the symbol of America's anti-war movement. Our senses, including our sense of justice, have become so dull that we cannot even feel the war. So when I ask "How can you ask someone to be the last to die... .?" America responses with "What you talking about?