We touch no victim, we smell no panic, we hear no scream. We sit and watch through a film of electrons. We have no right to the clean anonymity of numbers. Our work is to evaluate our motives, support those whose work is to follow the nation's orders, and grieve for the dead. All of them.

The military may use statistical projections because they themselves are included in the final count. They understand the meaning of the numbers because they must look into the faces of the "statistics".

If you want to consider war a science, go right ahead. I'll see your war, and raise you psychology. Big questions -- death being in the top three -- require the use of both halves of the brain.

Nothing that involves human beings can be totally objective, nor even totally rational. Otherwise the inscriptions on that black wall in Washington would be totally numbers and would need no names at all.

Regards--
Mary Anne