I’m sitting in my living room, flipping through the channels, and it occurs to me: We’re at war. And where are all the news cameras at 6 o’clock? Kabul? Nope. The Afghan-Pakistan border where hundreds of refugees are fleeing for their lives? Uh-uh. The cameras are stationed outside your friendly neighborhood post office. Wearing masks and gloves, flashing their little green life-saving pills of Cipro, postal workers are the heroes that risk their lives to make sure we get that check from Mom and Dad. I’m not trying to downplay their courage. If you told me, “Hey, put on these gloves and separate anything that looks like it might kill you,” I’d tell them to sort their own damn mail and find myself another job. I appreciate what they’re doing, and if I meet a D.C. postal worker one day, I’ll ask to shake his or her gloved hand.
I hate math, but I’d like to analyze some numbers here. Six thousand people were murdered on a day that, as a New Yorker and a human being, will haunt me for the rest of my life. Thirty-five is the number of Afghan civilians who died in one night in the Oct. 22 bombing of just one of the villages that has fallen under attack. Three, yes three, is the number of people who have died of anthrax over a span of several weeks. We can’t do anything now to save the men and women who lost their lives on what should have been an uneventful New York fall morning. But we can and should prevent the loss of more innocent life, wherever that life happens to be on the planet. Who knows how many more innocent Afghans will die in these fatal misses that prove our smart weapons aren’t so smart, or that our cluster bombs don’t really look all that different from humanitarian aid food packages? When will the numbers get so high that writing off destroyed villages as “collateral damage” will be more than we can stomach? I don’t know. But I do know how to protect myself and my loved ones from the anthrax epidemic that has claimed as many lives as you can count on one hand.
But shouldn’t the news focus on stories that affect us directly? Shouldn’t I be more worried about anthrax than the United States’ bombing of a country that already looks like the moon? I probably can’t convince most people that they should consider themselves world citizens, as well as American citizens, and that what happens to people anywhere is most definitely of our concern. So, I’ll play on your logic. First of all, the chances that you, a Georgetown student, would get an anthrax-sprinkled postcard are almost nil. Terrorists aren’t trying to destroy the fabric of America by wiping out the majority of the khaki-wearing population. They’re going for the big guys. And as much as that kid that sits next to you in International Relations wants to think that he’s the next Colin Powell, the terrorists don’t think we’re all that important. On the chance that you or someone you know is exposed, pop some Cipro and you’re good. Cipro, although it can rid people’s bodies of scary microorganisms, cannot protect people from bombs. What I’m saying is, if we’re smart and do as we’re told, we can stay healthy and safe. The people of Afghanistan don’t have that option.
I’m not saying that the mainstream media is outright ignoring the fact that we are very much at war, or that they should pretend anthrax isn’t travelling via airmail into mailrooms across the eastern seaboard. However, what I am suggesting is that there should be a considerable shift in the anthrax-to-other important news ratio. There are things going on 7,000 miles away that we’re not hearing enough about, or maybe not hearing about at all. Although it doesn’t seem like Fox 5 at Five has caught on that good journalism shouldn’t mean trying to scare the crap out of people to drive up ratings, there are other sources we can rely on. News from the BBC and AP Wire, and websites for Human Rights Watch (www.hrw.org) and Revolutionary Afghan Women’s Association (www.rawa.org), offer more information than you’ll get watching the news on your couch for hours. For now it seems that we’ll have to wait for the people of Afghanistan to get some more airtime. That is, of course, unless an Afghan sends a suspicious letter to the White House.
