Fragility and Malaise

As with the Abu Ghraib revelations, when they first came out, the events in the wider war are starting to take their toll upon me. As hostilities flared up again in Najaf last week, I found myself drawn, the proverbial moth to the flame, into the rapidly changing events on the ground. I sought out minute by minute updates, of which there were few. Regardless, I latched on to every bit of news from Najaf I could find.

As best as I was able that is, starving for wire services to report more detail, fanatically checking every blogger on the ground I could think of, on every side. Bit by bit I "watched" from afar, from the comfort and safety of home, shocked and appalled and beside myself with regret for my country's actions, for every step taken this last year toward the present situation in Najaf.

Arrogance, pure unbridled arrogance brought us to where we are today, with people, human beings, every one someone's child, killing and being killed, daily. For four days and nights I was up nearly twenty-four hours at a stretch, cataloguing and distilling reports in a series of diaries at Dkos, feeling angry, sad, and impotent.

And then yesterday I came across the two distinct and separate, yet equally utterly heartbreaking stories of soldiers, come home from Iraq physically intact, but who ultimately took their own lives, one within 24 hours of setting back down on American soil. There are no limits, it seems, to tragedy where this (or any other, I suppose) war is concerned. Sadness is truly heavy indeed.

In the midst of all this I find I crumble under the weight and all but succumb to a selfish desire to stop. To look away and not consider the toll in terms of both individual human beings and humanity as a whole. To ignore the probable paths from here, each taking Iraq, the United States, and indeed the whole of the world, toward futures at least equally as bleak and ugly as our present. To clip my empathetic nerve, wherever it may be, and stop feeling so much pain by proxy. I am weak, I suppose.

All of this is a long and, I'm afraid, overly melodramatic way of saying that if posting is scarce around here for the next couple of few days, it's simply a matter if exhaustion. I am too, though, a glutton of many sorts, and there's every possibility I'll post again in an hour. But for now, right now, I wanted to say what's now been said.

And yet, just yesterday I was tossing around the idea of launching an active online fundraising attempt to enable me to do this full-time. I've always been the self-destructive type....