Perspective

A friend of mine wrote on the Iraq War, and compared it to the great conflicts of the past. Honestly, I got angry. Here's a rebuke to those who think the world is in a bad place right now.

Around 20 million people died in the first World War, and 60 million in the second. With this war having cost us over 3,000 Americans and 150,000 Iraqis, totaled from both sides and civilians, we are looking at a lot of blood. But to compare this to wars of the past is just ignorant.

Our arrogance when viewing our times is just outrageous. Our sense of history is childish. We think we know war, and suffering, and that our world is so bad right now. And those who saw the horrors of the Third Reich and Stalin's KGB spin in their graves.

We have genocides right now, in Africa in particular. And this is terrible, and a cowardly UN labels them "ethnic cleansings" so it can defy one of its founding principles and not intervene. And this is shameful. But we do not know genocide, we don't understand Holocaust. 6 million dead Jews. No reason beside their religion. 11 million dead Russians, rotting for not standing by Stalin.

We have war right now, and all war is tragedy. But we do not know war. Nearly half of a generation of Europe's men were killed in The Great War. We lost over 10,000 men in one morning at D-Day in a conflict only one generation later. Our war in Iraq pales next to Vietnam, which in turn pales next to the World Wars.

We have rights being infringed upon in many parts of the world. China comes to mind. But those prisoners aren't seeing their wives raped and children murdered in front of them. The ash of their bodies isn't falling on an entire continent. There is no excuse for their mistreatment, but we are not witnessing one of history's grave moments.

We have racism in America, ubiquitous prejudice, I would argue. But we aren't seeing 6 year-olds knocked down by fire hoses. We have far to go, but we have come far, as well.

Some starve today, and there is no excuse for this, but Norman Borlaug and others revolutionized agriculture, and the man is credited with saving one billion lives. That's one with nine zeros, around three times the American population. The vast majority of poor Americans are overweight, as in the opposite of starving. This isn't the case everywhere, the but the world now has more overweight people than underweight ones. That is an accomplishment never reached before the last few years.

One of my dearest friends recently confessed to me how he felt that the world was so hopeless as of late, and it was all I could do to quietly give him a reality check. I wanted to yell. I've been blessed enough to tour Dachau with a man who was an inmate there. I've seen horror and loss in his eyes and words that I could never comprehend.

Do not dare to preach to me about the sorrows of today unless you know about yesterday. "We are dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants," and we have paper cuts we compare to beheadings. To all those who see the problems in our world, please, continue to try and bring change. To those who believe our world today to be so bad, grow up. Read a book.