Interlude

One of the main criticsms leveled at the exhibit in the past few weeks was that we have not shown the thousands of people killed by Saddam Hussein.

True. But we have also not tried to represent the 200,000 Iraqis killed in the first Gulf War, nor have we attempted to symbolize the 500,000 Iraqis who died under the US/UN economic sanctions against Iraq. The majority of that half a million of humanity were children.

Perhaps that is what we need – to cart around hundreds of thousands of tiny shoes and dump them in the federal plazas throughout the country until the nation realizes the futility of war. The aggressive coercion of the past decade has left the United States isolated, hated and vulnerable to attack.

The deaths by starvation, by lack of insulin, by infection due to lack of antibiotics are not recorded in the same way as the deaths of soldiers, but no less worthy of memorialization.

It seems that those of us living in the United States who seek peace need to keep showing the amount of deaths perpetrated in our name.