STUFF THAT PEOPLE DON'T WANT TO TALK ABOUT

I'm not even sure if the title of this post is grammatical or not. What the hell -- it's 4 in the morning.

Now certain things go without saying. I do not care that baby Dannielynn (or however the hell you spell the poor kid's name) is "home" in the U.S. Apparently we're supposed to have one hour specials on that so we can be sure to peer over her shoulder for the rest of her life.

No, I'm going to talk about something even more politically uncorrect. And I apologize in advance if someone who reads this is offended (which sort of goes against the principles of being "P.U." but then why not.)

Almost every day before, during and after the VT shootings, 32 people died in some city in Iraq. We don't even notice any more.

And then of course, there's Darfur.

When I pointed this out, someone said "Well, if you send your kid into the army, you expect that s/he will be in harm's way. but not when you send them to college."

True enough. But Iraqi parents send their kids to school, their spouses to work, their cousins to the grocery store. And they never come home.

In Darfur it's worse than that.

We won't get into a discussion of whether people who blow other people up in Iraq are patriots or madmen. It defies description. I don't understand it. We come from a people who started a revolution. Would we have blown up the British if we'd had the means? I don't know. The best we did was the Swamp Fox.

On a slightly less gruesome, but still puzzling note, we have now had two weeks of discussion of FDA oversight of tainted animal feed.

Tens of thousands of kids go hungry in this country alone every day, not to mention the millions around the world. Are we outraged?

What proportion of pets have health insurance? Hey, don't go all PEDA on me -- we ran in the Berkshire Humane Race with Moe and Duncan on Saturday. But the reality is that we watch kids living in conditions that would make a PEDA activist blanch and we don't do a darn thing. Maybe we should adopt some of their tactics and chain ourselves to schools and daycare centers until there's adequate funding and oversight.

We've now seen at least two if not three generations of kids stumble through failing inner city schools where violence competes with learning on a daily basis. Where's the outrage?

Just a thought.