Iraqi Roulette

Every evening, my own little way of "destressing" is browsing world news and other heavy stuff on Yahoo or Reuters or The Economist (but I still can’t pay for premium content), sometimes with a large mug of hot milk beside me. Yeah, yeah, milk is corny. But who can resist Alaska? No wonder "wala pa ring tatalo dito."

I have also developed this little mean game. Every evening, without fail, the top news on Yahoo is about how many innocent women and children are blasted to bits on the day’s round of suicide bombing. Tonight, for example, the count is around 70. I’m having a hard time imagining 70 mangled bodies stacked in a room; it totally freaks me out. But what further gets my goat and beats the shit out of me is such horrible existential horror happens daily in most towns in Iraq. Daily. Every. Single. Day. I can imagine the Iraqis sitting around the breakfast table each morning, each of them thinking it might be their very last. The taste of that breakfast depends on either they’re grateful for surviving another day (it would be the best-tasting breakfast ever), or sorely afraid of what the new day would bring (it would taste like desert sand).

The game I’ve developed is a simple guessing game. Today, the death tally is around 70. My bet for tomorrow, Thursday, is at least 40 and no more than 60. My bet for Friday is around 80, give or take 5. Saturday? Because it’s weekend and maybe the "special recruits" are scheduled to drag more people to their deaths, I’ll be a bit more generous: a hundred, I think, give or take 10. Especially now that the "insurgents" are desperate because Operation Matador is closing in on them.

And to tell you the truth, I’m hoping I’m over-estimating it. I’m hoping nobody dies tomorrow. I’m hoping this shit stops. But shit happens, and the funny thing about shit is that it never stops after you’ve fired its gears. Believe me. It’s like a machine that runs on nuclear fusion, or an energizer hamster pounding its treadmill. And like these corny examples, shit stops only when it has fully devoured itself.

Call me evil or nasty or mean, but I’m just a messenger, a middleman, a jaded scorer. The thing about statistics is that it takes away the flesh and blood. The funny thing about numbers is that it doesn’t show you the face of that kid smashed by shrapnel, or the decapitated body of a mother who only went out to buy Iraq’s version of vetsin or sukang iloko.

This is the only game in which I’m hoping I’m wrong–dead wrong–about my numbers.

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