First things first.  Thank you, thank you, thank you to loyal reader Ginny who so kindly provided me with a bag of designer black jelly beans - they were delicious.  Thank you to Adam for bringing me said jelly beans, they totally made up for the lack thereof in the Easter season.

Having said that, on to more current and topical matters.  This weekend in Iraq a "militia" set up checkpoints in a neighborhood, randomly dragged innocent people out of their homes and cars, and murdered them.  As a white, protestant American male who lives in the almost complete safety of his comfortable, suburban, well-furnished apartment, I am incredibly lucky and, by almost any standard in the rest of the world, completely spoiled.  It is out of the realm of my consciousness that someone might pull me from my house shoot me for my religious beliefs - and yet, for the city of Baghdad, that is reality here and now.  How did this happen?  When and where does the value of life become so little that it is tossed out for ideological belief?  Not in the context of international politics and criminal governments committing acts of pre-meditated, self--interested aggression (which almost seem rational in comparison) - but in the minds of the members of a community who have decided to take arms against neighbors?

With the term "civil war" bantered in the news today it brings to mind the Civil War of the United States, fought over 140 years ago.  With the hindsight of history we can analyze, dissect, consider, hypothesize, and try to fit the events of that war into a portrait that is comprehensible to our modern sensibilities.  In 1860 the flashpoint issue was slavery, and from 2006 we clearly see the series of events that drew the North and the South into armed conflict.  It is easy to map out battles, read speeches given in Congress, and understand the political and economic split in the country.  But read a little deeper in the pages of our own history and you will find similar stories to those in the news from Iraq.  In the often lawless towns on the frontier there were gangs of bandits that raided and destroyed in similar fashion.  Some of these bandits, like the James brothers, are still household names.  The difference between then and now, it seems to me, is not in human nature but in the tools.  They had swords, horses, revolvers, and rifles in the 1860s.  Today we have machine guns, rockets, explosives for suicide bombs, cars, trucks, and buses.  How would our own Civil War have turned out had it been fought in a post-1914 world with the modern implements of death and destruction?  Could we have built our government in Philadelphia with the same international scrutiny and intrigue that Iraqis had to endure while crafting their new society?

I weep for the families of those who were murdered in Iraq this weekend; I weep for the families of all those who have died in this mess since 2003.  I do not have answers; I do not have a fresh or well-educated perspective.  But I am curious, and I am tired of reading about bloodshed every day.  Can we not start an honest national dialogue about the events of our times, and try to find genuine ways (not more bombs, guns, and spies) to make this world a less violent, less dangerous place to live?  It seems a pipe dream to ask why, as a global community, we cannot put everything down and take care of each other first.  Short of that, I ask instead can we please just put down the guns?

B