Stephen as a 14yo girl

So, we’ve already seen the “Oh my gawd, I love my teacher so much, I mean she’s just so COOL,” post and the “There’s this boy, and he’s so sweet, but he’s gone and I’m sad,” post. Now it’s time for the confused, empathetic, angry 14yo girl scu to pop her head out.

Before I get into this, I want to point out that my public policy education has not been focused on international interest issues. My focuses are economic development (where I’ve had about a 2/3 slant towards domestic issues) and science, tech, and environmental policy, which has also had a pretty developed world slant. So, when it comes to international political stuff, world history, foreign relations, etc, I’m no genius. I’m just a schmo with some public decision making, economics, and stats courses, and a more than passing interest in the subject matter.

So, I read a recent post on about a guy who had been taking soldiers pictures of gruesome things (read ‘dead humans’ or perhaps I should say ‘defeated enemies’) and posting them (I think in exchange for access to porn). He’s been arrested on obscenity charges. And I browsed the pictures. They are indeed gruesome. If you really want to see for yourself, here is the infojunkies post, I trust you can find your way from there.

My reaction is a little complicated. I’m minorly grossed out. I’m hard to gross out, but a full color closeup of what looks like someone whose head was exploded is a little beyond the pale. The anger follows not far behind. Such a complete, idiotic waste of human life. In one of the posts I found from there, it also showed several black and white photos of what seems to be Japanese soldiers next to the severed heads of their enemy combatants, which provides important context, but gut reactions first.

The someone-else’s-hurt, angry, frustrated, disappointed, self-righteous response that ran through my head is that I want everyone who lives in the suburbs to look at these photos. I want them posted on gas pumps, just to drive the point home. I’m doing research on biodiesel and I’ve seen the pie chart for what we do with our oil imports. Damn near 2/3 of it goes to gas for cars. Mostly for commuting, I’d imagine, and in large part for SUVs. (diesel makes up about 18% and jet fuel a little less than that.)* I also know enough about urban planning to know that suburban car use v urban car use is enormously higher, and has to be enormously higher, because that’s the way the burbs are designed. I also know that central city real estate is rare in part due to zoning laws which make it tough to build tall buildings in most US cities.

Reason came shortly after. Rwanda isn’t a strategic supplier of oil last I checked. Nor Serbia. Etc. Furthermore, I have no idea whether Sadaam killed and/or tortured more people in Iraq per year than Bush has (to pin it all on the guys who are/were nominally in charge). But it’s all about freedom, right? That’s why we glut ourselves on Chinese imports, without serious censure of their human rights record, no? That’s why we’re helping the cultural majority in Iraq establish a regime which restricts women more than the Baathist regime did?

I’ve heard some of Dad’s stories from Iraq last year. A US soldier getting the back of his head pulped while taking a shower, another one taking a bullet in the wrist from celebratory fire coming back down, and the Iraqi girl whose father was beating her in public, when a female soldier intervened. The father brought them his daughter’s corpse the next day, saying that she had shamed him. Both the soldier who got his brain pulped and my dad, btw, were about as sheltered as US soldiers in Iraq got. I do not remotely pretend that these are representative tales.

I mean, I’m a realist; I know this sort of stuff happens all the time, right? I shouldn’t be so affected by it, right? So why was I having trouble getting back to sleep?

*=Another interesting tidbit is that about 90% of soybean meal (soybeans after the oil has been extracted, which is what most soybeans are turned into) is used to feed livestock. Direct consumption v inefficient animal processing. At least this gives me confidence that an energy shock wouldn’t kill us humans. Probably alot of cows, and alot of us humans would go veggie, but it wouldn’t kill us.