I’m determined to have a good year this year, even if I have to bite and scratch and fight for it. Last year was a bad year, and actually, the year before that was actually pretty bad too. For whatever reason I’ve just been feeling kind of lost… and I am really sick of that feeling. I don’t want to spend any more time feeling like that.

I’m not even going to make a bunch of resolutions this year. Last year I made some and two weeks later I couldn’t even remember what they were. So this year I’m only going to concentrate on one thing: I’m going to stay in constant motion and I’m going to concentrate on learning as much as I can. Me and Bunny are going to try to grow this website as much as we can. I only have a little while here on Earth and I’m not exactly a kitten any more, I think it’s time for me to start fulfilling my obligations. Here I go.

~ pinky

Bunny just posted our first episode on our website. I had a chance to sit down and do a very short interview with my friend Dr. Hui, who was nice enough to drive all the way out here from LA (I think it’s about a two or three-hour drive). Besides doing the interview, we gave Dr. Hui a nice tour around the immediate vicinity (the old trailer park, the huge electrical power line towers, the semi-abandoned junk yards) and we also showed him our plans for the university we’re hoping to build one day (I think he was impressed). We really enjoyed his visit.

Even though it’s just one episode on our website so far, at least now I feel like we’re slowly moving forward. It’s a start. We have three more episodes in-progress, I hope to have them all done and posted on our website very soon.

~ pinky

I was browsing the internet last night when I came across a photo that really shocked me. It was a photograph of an Iraqi man who had been shot in the head by a U.S. army sniper. His head was basically gone, his face was flattened out and floppy like an empty rubber mask. There was blood everywhere, trailing away from his head via a small foamy river. He had no head any more, but he did have blue pants and clean tennis shoes. It’s hard to believe that someone’s life can end so quickly, and with so much violence.

This morning I woke up with a huge knot in my stomach. I’m sure it was that awful photograph and for most of the morning I kept wishing I hadn’t ever seen it. Then I started wondering to myself, “How many Iraqi people have died during this war?” I went online and found a website called iraqbodycount.org. The current estimate is somewhere around 30,000 civilians killed by military intervention in Iraq. This is a number that exceeds my comprehension.

There’s been a lot of argument here in the U.S. about whether it’s right or wrong to show photos of dead people, be they U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians, in our newspapers or on the evening news. But if my not-very-close encounter with just one dead Iraqi man left me so sad and angry, I can only imagine what would happen if people were confronted with many, many more images of this kind of violence and suffering. I don’t want to see photos of mutilated children, but I’m sure there are thousands. They must exist - but where are they? I still don’t understand why all the news reports of bombings, kidnappings, executions, errant missles and whatnot don’t seem to affect me on the same visceral level that that one photo did. Maybe if you want to stop war, you have to show pictures.

~ pinky

Today is “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day” here in the U.S. Which is also to say that the other 364 days of the year are “Not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day”. In their place may I suggest “Malcolm X Day” (May 19), “Sitting Bull Day” (how about June 25?), “Anne Sullivan Day” (April 14), and about 361 others.

~ pinky

I’m still being haunted by that awful photograph (Jan. 14 entry), and the insane war that produced it. You know, one of the places that photograph led me to was to think about the disparity of numbers of the dead. 30,000 Iraqi civilian dead, 2,000 U.S. soldiers dead. I don’t mean to trivialize death and suffering by going on and on about numbers, but I can’t help but wonder - is this kind of disparity between the number of dead soldiers versus the number of dead civilians ‘typical’ in times of war, or is this war in particular some kind of highly unusual exception?

I did some quickie ‘research’ (I use the term very loosely, sorry) and learned that during wars, it’s not unusual for many more civilians to die than soldiers. Once such example being World War II: about 25 million soldiers died, compared to over 62 million civilians deaths. The Korean War was similar in this respect: about 750,000 dead soldiers (North Korean, South Korean, Chinese, U.S., U.N., Soviet) versus between 1.25 to 1.55 million civilian deaths (both sides). I don’t have exact figures because I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how many people die during wars…

Another thing I didn’t realize is how many war-time deaths are caused by starvation, disease, exposure, drought, ‘friendly fire’, atrocities, and so on. For example, during the American Civil War, twice as many soldiers died from non-combat related reasons than were killed in ‘action’.

When someone says the word “war”, I immediately think of “death”. The thing is, though, that the iconic image of ‘war-time death’ that immediately comes to mind is of a soldier (invariably a male soldier) being shot, bombed, bayonet-ed, grenade-ed, or otherwise killed by… well, another male soldier.

Obviously I have an overly simplistic, one-dimensional concept of how wars actually destroy lives - children, women, the elderly, soldiers… cats… And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who thinks like this. So I’m curious - what would be a good way to teach people about war and what it really is?

~ pinky