Journals
Friday,Aug 7 2009, 01:05:26 AMDrug war toll greater than Iraq-Afghani war
War toll tallies are something we listen to on our news broadcasts like the sports results. We wonder how many US American personnel have been KIA over the past week. We would watch the result on News in Review on US PBS. At the end of the weekly wrap up, the roll call honour of the KIA are broadcasted as an obituary list. Perhaps, paradoxically too, this is the only 15 minutes of fame, for any GI would ever get on global television, that is to say, when they are announced as a fallen war hero.
In the meantime, America has faced their purported demons in far off and exotic Semitic landscapes dying in some exotic foreign soil has given an aura of romanticism for the ordinary suburban American kid, who would otherwise had ended up as some factory fodder working in some steel mill, becoming a boring mundane process worker in an unsophisticated ergonomic lifestyle. The promise of travel and adventure appeals to the would be recruit, the thrill of clear and present danger woos the most daring recruit to enlist into the armed forces.
Meanwhile, the domestic turmoils are relatively ignored, the problems of criminal activities within the neighbourhood are overlooked and are overwhelmed with the troubles afar. The death toll from the 3,000 or so American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a serious problem for the American foreign policy confidence. All the while, right at the doorsteps of America, in Mexico, where there has been a cartel warlord war, since December 2006, some 13,000 Mexican civilians and or purported criminal elements, have been slain. The war on drugs has claimed three times as many as American GIs KIA in the multi-billion dollar 'war on terror' in some exotic lands so far away.
http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/mp/5783791/drug-killings-soar-as-obama-heads-to-mexico-summit/
American foreign policy formulators, the media, have fuzzed up the priorities of American foreign policy, so as to belittle certain unattractive domestic squabbles in favour of the more alluring and exotic conflicts far off from the more 'familiar' environs of gringos going trigger happy next door.
We have seen how the purveyors of power may control what we are exposed to, therefore, what priorities we gauge that can make certain news bigger somewhere else and very diminished everywhere else.
Good day,
Tim Tufuga