Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Students killed in Baghdad university bombing

I’m affected by a lot of news from Iraq, but the news of the bombing outside Al-Mustansiriya University in Baghdad that killed seventy students, mostly female, and injured more than a hundred, really cast a pall on my day. I was saddened and sickened as I went to my university workplace in relative safety and freedom, reflecting upon this sobering piece of news and what these Iraqi students and university staff must be experiencing.

It also comes on the heel of the news that tens of thousands of people were violently killed in Iraq last year and tens of thousands more injured.

May the US neocons and likudniks burn in hell for what they have unleashed here. Get the heck out and leave the Iraqis alone! Go invest in R&D and develop alternative fuels! Your greed and entitlement mentality are despicable.

Relatives cry after collecting the bodies of their loved ones from al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday Jan. 17, 2007. Twin car bombs tore through a leading Baghdad university as students left classes in the deadliest attack in Iraq in nearly two months killing at least 65 students. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

AP Photo: Relatives cry after collecting the bodies of their loved ones from al-Kindi hospital in Baghdad, Iraq, Wednesday Jan. 17, 2007. Twin car bombs tore through a leading Baghdad university as students left classes in the deadliest attack in Iraq in nearly two months killing at least 65 students. (AP Photo/Karim Kadim)

We need to live more simply, so that others may simply live. We have storage companies because we have too much “stuff”. We have walk-in wardrobes larger than others’ living areas. We are consuming at an obscene rate, and selfishly complain about fuel costs, encouraged to think that rampant consumerism is somehow our birthright. Poverty means watching the world’s rich go buy. The affluent aren’t just hogging all the resources, they’re stealing from their own children and robbing future generations. Infinite growth is just not materially possible. Injudicious use of resources is leading us all to destruction. Have we got a civilizational death-wish or is it the idea of civilization that needs serious re-thinking?

2 comments on “Students killed in Baghdad university bombing

  1. unitedcats
    18 January, 2007

    As Ghandi said when asked what he thought about western civilization: “I think it would be a very good idea.” It frightens me that so many Americans refuse to see that we are responsible for unleashing the carnage in Iraq. Jesus wept.
    JMO —Doug

  2. peoplesgeography
    19 January, 2007

    Thanks Doug, I very much appreciate that classic Gandhi quip. Yes, it would be a good idea. You and I are likeminded on this and many other topics, makes me admire you even more for engaging so courteously with others of a different political persuasion on your site (somehow I think that response from Bereans won’t be coming) ;)

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Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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