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From The Asian Reporter, V17, #30 (July 24, 2007), page 7.
How we count: What’s wrong with Yank stats
I have not been American very long. Not long at all. Sometimes I worry about staying one any longer. Take these times. Our mean times.
I tell you true, with an immigrant’s sincerity, our uncles adored Americans, also not so long ago.
Those Yanks were broad shouldered, open hearted, young men from Nebraska and Iowa named John and Jimmy and Jack. They were tall, maybe a bit dopy, but always very polite. They beat the hell out of our enemy.
Our persistent parents and us frightened sons found much the same humanity when we finally got off the boat here. Kindness unexpected, generosity from a folk who had more, much more to give than any Old Worlder might imagine. Wealth unimaginable. That was America too.
Then things changed. America got ugly.
We wouldn’t believe it.
Our elders insisted this cannot be true. Pero, one blessed Sunday in early July, on a late afternoon around Oma’s kitchen table, we recalled every time it happened; we counted each of those times on our fingers. We counted them up again.
And no matter who did our tallying — smart-aleck liberal arts college cousins or patriotic blue collar brothers — it always came out the same. That number. The number of times America sent out our stratospheric bombers, sent out our angry navy.
Sixteen.
Sixteen times since those good old times when we really believed in America. In American ideals.
Mistaken numbers
Let me say right away, not one of us was happy with these numbers. Not a soul was satisfied.
Not only because no pride we take in destroying families or crushing homes, but because these numbers lie. Because, indeed, our number-keepers err. They err awfully in a new American way.
We saw the mistaken numbers in President Johnson’s Viet Nam, in President Nixon’s Cambodia, in President Reagan’s Lebanon, in President Clinton’s Somalia. I hear President Bush’s war numbers from my tired old Toyota’s radio on our rush hour crawl over the Sunset Highway.
American reporters tell only how many Baghdadis died; how many U.S. Marines or Army men and women perished so far-far away from home. The numbers: 300 of theirs; six of ours.
But these numbers fail. Those journalists fall down. Our leaders lie.
The truth — any elder auntie will tell you, every big uncle will assure you — is that who goes to God is one thing. Who sorrows for their passing, is another. Modern Americans may count by individuals lost, but Old Worlders count by family sorrowing.
Of course, every passed-on precious son or daughter, husband or mother, is missed. But what matters even more is how many hearts are forever broken. How many bones are irrevocably embittered.
We don’t get over it. Emotional "closure," an individual moving on, is an alien idea to our traditional folk.
A better count for political leaders, a truer arithmetic for our popular media, would be the actual number of lives irreparably affected by every combat or collateral death. All we need to do is plug a realer American number, and say, a truer Arab equivalent, into our better equation.
Let’s do this: for every Dayton, Ohio soldierboy killed by a Sadr City roadside bomb, record that 50 relatives and friends suffer inconsolably. For every Najaf school girl lost to an errant helicopter rocket, remember that 150 relatives and family friends sorrow until they too pass away.
Forget for a moment how our young men rage. Forget it for this minute only — remember though, they never will. Ever.
And so goes our next cycle of anger.
I read in this morning’s paper — I wish now that I hadn’t — that nine American soldiers will not come home. I read that 379 Iraqis will not see their mothers again. By our above calculus: that’s actually 450 plus 56,850 wives and daughters, fathers and brothers, aunties and grandmas, overcome this lovely summer morning with immeasurable sadness.
These are our numbers. Those are the real results of sending those awesome armies and numbing air forces to solve the problems of Old World families across our aching planet’s deep blue seas. So far America has come from our dreaming, not so long ago.
And come next Sunday afternoon, familia smiling across every immigrant oma’s dinner table, we will not contradict our elders’ delicate idealism about our now-brutal America. Not us. Not us believers. Dreamers don’t change. Dreamers won’t. Our America must. Insh’allah.