Good morning, stop signs
For several months now I've been using this greeting, mainly to remind us that we are about sending the message to those in charge that we want to yell, "stop, we want to get off this madness of the war."
Last night on the News Hour, as part of the pro-forma Iraq report of the day's mayhem, there was mention, yet again, of a vehicle with three civilians being shot up at a road-block because it didn't stop. The occupants were, as usual, killed.
Now, what irked me first about this report was that it was presented as if that was an isolated incident, not something that's been going on since the occupation arrived. There was no mention of the fact that there are discharged Marines wandering around the country describing for everyone they meet the horror they still feel for what they've done in "lighting" up car after car of civilians, usually filled with children.
Then, for some reason, I started thinking about how this mayhem came to be. After all, the video of the occupation arriving in Baghdad showed lots of modern highways with overpasses and ramps and road-signs suspended to give directions. And, these road signs are in Arabic and English. So, I wondered, did the troops just assume that because the road-signs are in English, all the residents speak it? And is that why they keep yelling at people to stop and then wave their weapons in the air and sometimes shoot them off when they don't?
But then it occurred to me that waving weapons is a really peculiar way to try to stop traffic, regardless of what language people speak. I'm sure it wouldn't go over real well in this country. Indeed, in this country whenever there's a reason to stop the flow of traffic for an accident or a construction project or some other temporary incident, we have people specifically assigned to step out into the road with a sign that says SLOW and STOP, and that's what people do. In fact, I'd bet that hand held stop signs are part of the normal inventory of a lot of police car trunks.
Obviously, though we've sent a lot of police cars over to Iraq, somebody forgot to include the stop signs. Indeed, we already know that somebody forgot the body armour and the armour for the jeeps. But, just maybe if they'd remembered to bring stop signs and if they'd received instructions to drive slow in Iraq, to make sure that their multi-ton vehicles didn't chew up the roadways and the medians and run over people, they wouldn't have needed the armour to begin with.
Could it be that for lack of a stop sign Iraq was lost?
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Posted by Hannah at November 22, 2005 05:11 AM