For once, you must not try to shirk the facts

You know, I'm guilty of it. When I click over to Yahoo! to search for something, which I do at least once a day, I always glance over at the little "In The News" box. And every day I see things like this:

• Jordan's King Abdullah vows to hunt bombers
• Blasts targeting Iraqi police kill more than 40
• Mental trauma widespread in Asia quake zone
• Riots seen hitting France's image abroad

I'm ashamed to say it's stopped registering sometimes. I know some of that is necessary for my sanity--one of the trickiest paths we all have to walk as humans involves answering this question: How much of others pain can we really let ourselves feel?

You want to feel for your fellow man, you want to be compassionate (I mean, unless you're a conservative, right-wing "Christian"). Yet at the same time Brecht & Weill were not wrong when they wrote:

Mankind can keep alive, thanks to its brilliance
At keeping its humanity repressed
For once, you must not try to shirk the facts:
Mankind is kept alive by bestial acts

If you felt for everything and anybody, you'd quite simply go mad.

Nevertheless, there are times when I think it's important to really look "beneath the headlines," especially when the story is told by somebody who knows how to capture it. This is what's happening in Iraq every damn day. And we're fighting for freedom.

Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 29 in Crowded Baghdad Restaurant

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

...By late morning, the restaurant had become quiet. A small boy, the son of a Christian man who sold soda near the restaurant, walked on the sidewalk, repeating, "Oh daddy, oh daddy."

A man asked a police officer if his brother was among the dead, and walked off without a word when the officer answered yes.

Details seemed not to fit together. A man in a crisp yellow shirt and dress pants used a shovel to pick up pieces of flesh. A hand clutching a cloth lay just beyond a shoeshine- polish box on the sidewalk.

A small group of workers and police officers discussed the identity of a human face, ears and scalp shorn of its skull that had been hanging from a piece of plaster from the ceiling.

On the wall inside, the only two things left hanging were a small sprig of fake red flowers, and a medallion that had the word "God" in gold letters....

Every day. Every damn day.