Routing for the body count

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

It’s okay. It’s alright. It doesn’t make you Timotthy McVeigh or put you on 
the FBI’s most wanted. It’s not altogether abnormal- these secret pleasures- 
the possibility of the toll being higher than Pearl Harbor- or 
disappointments- fewer than expected at the Pentagon. Inspite of the heaps of 
abuse gleefully piled on Freud he was as much right as he was wrong, but 
certain phenomenon cannot be reduced to simple causes- or stay reduced for 
long. The gathering together is ineluctable.

In this apogee of uncertainty, before the true body count becomes known, 
while it is still unclear where to draw the line between subject and object, 
us and them, the living and the dead- it might help to acknowledge that as 
necessary as that line may be- in order “to be”- where exactly to make that 
“epistemic cut” is largely arbitrary. Like all observation and measurement, 
it’s just a matter of time.

Life might be defined as the ability and the need to make arbitrary 
distinctions. Where that need and ability come from is a sublime miracle that 
no amount of objectivity can make sense of.

One doesn’t have to hate inorde to avoid feeling guilty. Routing for the body 
count, whether one is conscious of it or not, is complementary with survivor 
guilt. The two are not mutually exclusive, except by an unhealthy act of 
repression. Association with the aggressor is another related phenomenon, 
described, but not entirely explained by, the need to make arbitrary 
distinctions. And numbers are arbitrary, fueled by the video game-like media 
circus, and the emotional distance it can produce.

Sadness is okay, too.