Written by Don Washington   

We're going spend over $5 trillion dollars on these wars and occupations, according to Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz and every day we are going to kill a few more children. We won't hear about them and we won't care about them even if we kill thousands of them but we will lose sleep over Casey Anthony's innocence or guilt or whatever. It's not that I don't care about that dead child. I care as much as I can given that I am completely unconnected to her and the circumstances of her death. A dead child is a tragic thing. A murdered child is a blasphemy. Tens of thousands of children murdered in my name with my tax dollars and in direct contravention of my values is an anathema that should be stopped immediately.

I feel that way down beyond my soul because I am directly attached to the actions of my government. All of us are directly connected to the deaths of these children. We should all be screaming out damn spot but most of us aren't because maybe it's easier to be overwhelmed with sadness when you bear no guilt in the crime. If Casey Anthony is a monster for killing her one child what are we for condoning and ignoring the deaths of at least 65,904 of them? If this is not the act of denizens of a nightmare nation I'm not sure what is.

I've not been following the Casey Anthony trial. If not for the media losing its collective mind about the verdict I still wouldn't know anything about it. People broke down and cried on television about this dead child. One body, one life, one soul taken but I wonder how many of them have shed a single tear for any of the estimated 50,154 Iraqi or 15,750 children who have been killed in our dual occupations. I have to say estimated because no one counts the thousands of children cut down every year in our occupation zones. They die by bullets, drones, disease, starvation and bombs. They die off stage, there is no Nancy Grace going ballistic over them and no morning talk show personalities so stricken with grief that they can't rise to their own feet.

As I heard the media lose its collective sanity over the death of this one child I was reminded of two particularly horrid incidents. Back in February Josh Partlow of the Washington Post wrote that now CIA Director Gen. David Petraeus said that Afghans had burned their own children to exaggerate claims of civilian casualties in Konor province in the Ghaziabad district. The other was the infamous Wiki-leaks video where a reporter, his cameraman, their guide and then two children and their father who showed up to help them were all gunned down by a helicopter gunship. We, America, couldn't follow those stories for an entire day... we followed... well many followed the Casey Anthony story for a solid year. We did not lose any sleep over these dead children who were executed in our name, with our tax dollars and blessing but people are openly weeping at the death of one child.

Here, in America there are people who have come unglued over the death of a toddler that they've never met and did not know. Right here we have media outlets that reach millions of citizens and consumers everyday telling them that they should hate a jury, the jury system and castigate a woman for the rest of her life... which some unstable people may feel called upon to end. Here in America the death of one child makes us question our entire judicial system but the deaths of at least 65,904 children doesn't even make a ripple in our collective conscience. It may be that we don't have one. It could be that we do not care that in our name a bare minimum of this many children are dead. I say that because no one really keeps track of child deaths... not really and people are scrambling to count civilian deaths.

I had to pull these numbers from Human Rights Unit of the United Nations Assistance Mission to Afghanistan, the Washington Post, the Guardian U.K., Antiwar.com and WolframAlpha.com. I readily cop to two things. One, these numbers are not hard numbers. I can't be sure how firm they are. Two, they are under counts. Wherever I could I went low and still came back with these scary numbers. These numbers scare me because children do not die alone. They belong to someone. They needed someone's protection and that person could not give it to them. Maybe that person physically survived the death of their child. Maybe that person was on their way home and returned to the death of their child. I can feel their despair and hatred from here. I can hear the beating of their hearts like drums calling them to vengeance. Could you forgive the people that took your child's life with an impersonal and seemingly unstoppable violence. We do not count these children but somebody else does and we don't seem to care about their blood on our collective hands but somebody else must.

“Children are bearing the brunt of this conflict and also experiencing physical and psychological trauma.” That's what the Secretary-General’s Special Representative, Radhika Coomaraswamy, said and she meant it because it's true. I want to live in a country where the apoplectic insanity that has consumed this country over the death of one toddler would be magnified a thousand times at the deaths of these children. I want to know why we can pay attention to the lurid details of one child's death but can't be bothered to pay any attention to the on-going deaths of over at least 65,000 children?