From Iraq Body Count: A Reminder of What the Invasion Has Cost in Human Lives

A reminder at Common Dreams today that over 162,000 people--mostly civilians--have been killed in Iraq following the U.S. invasion of that nation in 2003.  The data are from Iraq Body Count.

My tax dollars have paid for this assault on the lives of other innocent human beings.  I am implicated.  I am guilty.

I cannot pray now to the Sorrowful Mother who cradles the body of her dead son close to her heart without admitting my complicity in criminal actions that have handed the bodies of other murdered children into the arms of other grieving mothers--and not in the distant past.  But right in the world in which I live today, the world I have helped to build in my own lifetime.

There are days when the woe of living in the world we've made together in recent years--the world I have made--seems altogether too much.