There’s something so very clean about the term collateral damage. It’s easy to digest, not unlike ‘surgical strike’ or ‘smart bomb’. After all, surgeries require skill, and smart is certainly not stupid.
Of course, none of that matters to the families that lose children in ‘surgical strikes’ in which ‘smart bombs’ are employed. Their deaths are ‘collateral damage’, which is to be regretted, but what is there to say? It’s a shame that young Hussain was tending goats so close to where our surgically targeted smart bomb struck?
No one really gives a shit. I’ll say it of no one else will.
Hussain lived on the other side of the world in some backwards village that has seen murderers from all parts of the world come and go. Some of them are locals, some are foreigners. In the end, Hussain was just a kid watching some goats that ended up in several hundred pieces because he was at the wrong place at the wrong time, born in the wrong country at the wrong time, the member of the wrong culture and religion at the wrong time.
We stand in line to get coffee in the morning and the Hussain’s of the world don’t make a dent. We have lunch, dinner, watch television, go to the movies, go on vacation, and none of it really matters. There are thousands of Hussain’s, and thousands more that will vanish for some reason or another in various parts of the world, but that shouldn’t be cause for alarm. Oh, our admirably plush guilt will rear its head and cry aloud how terrible it all is, but tomorrow some other kid tending goats will get torn to shreds by a Predator, another girl will be raped and killed in Darfur, and another mother will die in Somalia leaving behind three children.
What do you think all of that produces? What do you think that sorrow, futility, and anger engineer?
The answer is a single, ugly word – hate. And if hate is all that you have left to sustain you then it will become your pillar.
Hussain’s two brothers weren’t with him when he was killed. But you can bet that while one of them might heed his mother’s desperate pleas not to do anything rash, the other might not. And so ‘collateral damage’ will have produced yet another ‘enemy’ with which to deal. And, as is always the unfortunate case in this world, while targeting Hussain’s brother and his fellow militants, perhaps another young boy tending goats will get blown to bits.
There are two sides to every story – the one you want to believe and the one you don’t.