I am sorry Nicholas Berg. I am watching your death, and I am mourning for you like I was your friend. I feel like your friend. I think that you were trying to befriend the world, and that you, through your brief and unexpectedly ended life, have prevailed.
I wish peace and healing for the Berg family. What has happened is an outrage, and ultimately, can never be apologized for. Losing a child must be the worst pain there is. But to have the entire world focused on it and politicians using it as a bargaining chip leaves us to wonder, “where is God?” What kind of God allows this to happen? In the world we live in, how do we expect to go on?
It is a sick kind of “Keeping up with the Joneses.” I will see your prison abuse, and I will raise you one beheading. Poker face. Yeah, I know. It is horrible, because war is horrible, and bloody in its scope, the sheer volume of human rage, not to mention bloodshed.
But let it be known, loud and clear. There is no such thing as revenge. The word and deed exist and the idea of sweet retribution is appealing but never satisfying when actually carried out. Avenging angels/ devils/ infidels/ insurgents are never satisfied. They are always left wanting, or bitter, disappointed. Our egos are bigger than our stomachs, which can only consume so much blood and bile before it is regurgitated onto ourselves.
What do you do in times like these? Where do we go? What is going to happen now? It isn’t a game, and since there are no ways to play, how do you stop? Does this mean everyone has to die? What is hideous, unavoidable, tragic – is the widespread coverage of it all, the way the information flashes forward in ominous RealPlayer detail to all points on the map. But perhaps, this is our saving grace. Because the pictures are gory, they are mounting day by day, the death toll is rising with a bullet, there is no escape. If you are not commenting on it, you are not here.
What would God say? I ask my God to help us. He shrugs his shoulders and says nothing. My God is kind of lazy that way. My God takes three hour martini lunches and calls it a day far sooner than He should. He likes me to work shit out on my own. He is cool though.
I am terribly sad for all the dead, injured, abused, Iraqi and American, military and civilian, hero or madman, everybody – because there is no reason anymore for this escalating violence. It isn’t “Spy vs. Spy.” It is human life. People, with mothers and fathers, sisters and brothers, hometowns like Philadelphia or Baghdad.
My heart goes out for all the suffering in the world. I wish to breathe it all into my lungs, let it run all the way through my respiratory and circulatory system, and exhale pure love and ever loving compassion. Peace y’all.