Perspective

4,000 american's have died in Iraq. This is seen as an outrage by many people and a terrible waste of life. There are other factors including money and iraqi lives that people could argue about, but usually when people talk about getting out of iraq it's to save the soldiers. Bring our boys home and get them out of harms way. (3,000 people died in 9/11). Now originally my source of perspective was deaths from drunk driving. I could be misremembering, but as i recall 20,000 Americans die a year from drunk driving. Now i could be wrong, but it seems to me that 20,000 is a larger number than 4,000. In fact it is much larger. And if you factor in that the iraq war has been going on for 5 years, that makes it 4,000 vs. 100,000. Before all the cries for the safety of our soldiers maybe some people should think about the safety of our streets.

But another event has occured recently which gives us even more perspective. A cyclone hit burma. Burmese officials were warned 2 days ahead of time that this cyclone was going to hit. Their response was to do nothing. After the cyclone hit international agency and countries around the world begged the burmese government to allow rescue workers to help out. Their response was no. After days of begging it finally seems the burmese may be willing to allow some international rescue efforts. It has now been estimated that the death toll may pass 100,000. While the deaths from this cyclone certainly weren't completely preventable I do believe they were largely preventable. Just like that 100,000 people are gone, and not only did their government do nothing to protect them, their government actively prevented others from coming to their aid. So for all the people who are upset about the state of america, or the iraq war, or the democrats, or the republicans, or any other nonsense, maybe take a second to think about how lucky you are to have been born in the united states, and not in burma.