Land of the lost

I get leery of organized events like peace rallies. I tend to think of them as knee-jerk reactions to events that are already in place. Can even a half-million people with marionettes and placards stop 800 missiles from being dropped in the first two days of “engagement"? This is more than was dropped in the 48 days of the Persian Gulf War. CN&R “black-hearted” cartoonist Craig Blamer says it feels like it did in ‘91, when the air was electric downtown with a sense that “everyone was chewing on tinfoil.”

I turned off my TV on 9-12-01. I just couldn’t stand to see such horrific images repeated endlessly. But I still capture the headlines of the world every morning at www.drudgereport.com. So I am not out of tune with the situation at hand. It is just as I said, nothing that I wish to protest in public. Besides, the irony of driving your car to a bigger city to protest a “war fought for oil” is even too much for me to bear. I have been busy coming to terms with my own personal reaction to it all. We need to get the UN to put together a deal wherein the United Nations can buy Iraq from Saddam Hussein. A straight-up business deal, as every man has his price. Saddam surely has his.

My rational behind this is that Baghdad, as well as greater Iraq, has something more important to the world than mere oil. It contains clues to our species origins. It was the home of the biblical Tower of Babel. There is no surety that we would find such legendary structures, but the assault that is being planned would surely destroy any chance we might have had. I don’t think it is “peace” we should be focusing on, but “knowledge” of our place here on earth. We have never truly answered the question, “Where do we come from?” And thus have little perspective on “where we are.” Thereby shooting arrows into the dark of “where we’re going.”

It is debated that "life" started in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia (the region we wish to blow to smithereens), but we do know that an advanced culture, the Sumerians, lived there and recorded much of their "coming and goings." Are we so arrogant that we can let this historic region be lost?