Tales of two lives via Cowboy Kahlil
He writes,

I want to bring you a glimpse of two lives, lived on the line between our humanity and inhumanity. I don't know if this has already gone around, but it's important enough to consider again, if it has. It is the last emails from peace activist Rachel Corrie to her family, before she was run over by a bulldozer in the Gaza Strip,

Rachel in a remarkable series of emails to her family, she explained why she was risking her life,

…I have been in Palestine for two weeks and one hour now, and I still have very few words to describe what I see. It is most difficult for me to think about what's going on here when I sit down to write back to the United States. Something about the virtual portal into luxury. I don't know if many of the children here have ever existed without tank-shell holes in their walls and the towers of an occupying army surveying them constantly from the near horizons. I think, although I'm not entirely sure, that even the smallest of these children understand that life is not like this everywhere…..”

…. I am in Rafah: a city of about 140,000 people, approximately 60% of whom are refugees - many of whom are twice or three times refugees…. I know that from the United States, it all sounds like hyperbole. Honestly, a lot of the time the sheer kindness of the people here, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the wilful destruction of their lives, makes it seem unreal to me. I really can't believe that something like this can happen in the world without a bigger outcry about it. It really hurts me, again, like it has hurt me in the past, to witness how awful we can allow the world to be………This is what I am seeing here. The assassinations, rocket attacks and shooting of children are atrocities - but in focusing on them I'm terrified of missing their context. The vast majority of people here - even if they had the economic means to escape, even if they actually wanted to give up resisting on their land and just leave (which appears to be maybe the less nefarious of Sharon's possible goals), can't leave. Because they can't even get into Israel to apply for visas, and because their destination countries won't let them in (both our country and Arab countries). So I think when all means of survival is cut off in a pen (Gaza) which people can't get out of, I think that qualifies as genocide.

American marine killed in Iraq
Kendall Damon Waters-Bey was among four U.S. Marines and eight British soldiers killed when a CH-46 helicopter crashed in Kuwait.

..At home, his sisters recalled, he excelled in jokes and cooking. He was always making faces, making people laugh," said 28-year-old Michelle Waters. ""He loved his son," the elder Waters-Bey said. The elder Waters-Bey" said he opposed war with Iraq."I'm against killing for any reason," he said. When asked what he would tell President Bush if he got the chance, he replied: "This was not your son or daughter. That chair he sat in at Thanksgiving will be empty forever.

Michelle Waters, the oldest of the dead Marine's four sisters, criticized the U.S. government for starting the hostilities. "It's all for nothing, that war could have been prevented," she said Friday night in the living room of the family home, tears running down her cheeks. "Now, we're out of a brother. [President] Bush is not out of a brother. We are."

Is there any difference between Palestinian kids who Rachel talked about and Kendall’s son? He will never see his father again. Or Doha. She has lost all movement in her left leg because cruise missile exploded close to her home in Baghdad and blasted shrapnel into her tiny legs. Or innocent Israeli kids killed by suicide bombers. Or many Iraqi malnourished children are put at great risk in Basra, Baghdad?????
(posted by Iman)

Posted:Thursday, March 27, 2003 |