Please Kill Nicely

The post on NPR news this morning leaves me scratching my head. The story reports the boiling outrage over a group of Marines desecrating dead Taliban insurgents by peeing on the bodies. It seems to me it's a classic case of misplaced ire.

To my way of thinking the time when people, nations, and religious groups ought to raise their voices in outrage over the mistreatment of a body is when that body is still alive. File me under "callous bastard" but, to me it seems a case of rather badly missing the point when people feel outrage over the mistreatment of a hundred and fifty pounds of dead flesh that has been shot or blown to bits in an act of intentional, government authorized, use of deadly force.

When you think about the unbearable inhumanity to man-- bodies with 6 inch pieces of head missing, limbs mangled or absent, bodies crushed or badly burned-- in such circumstances I am always dumbfounded at the effort that goes into humanizing the carnage. Like the reports that tally the number of civilian dead or reports stating a child was among the dead when bombs are dropped to wipe out a group of "enemy targets."

Here in Michigan it fully grosses me out the number of smashed, dead and mangled animal carcasses we have littering our roads. When not covered with snow, half the paved surface of Michigan is red. I realize it's only squirrels, raccoons and deer (and pheasant, turkey, fox...) but, seeing all these smashed remains, I think about the dead and wounded humans in similar states that lay on roadsides each day; not random accidents but intentional targets of human action.

The long and the short of it is this: as the saying goes, war is hell. I can't get far enough beyond all the killing and injury to let me get upset about what happens after they're dead. If you want to convince a group of young people that it is their job and duty to seek out and kill people then you should also be prepared to accept that they really aren't going to have a great deal of respect for the remains of their handiwork. And if you really, really can't tolerate how the bodies of the dead are treated after we've intentionally snuffed out their life, then maybe, just maybe, we need to think about resolving issues without killing people in the first place.