I like the end of her article...
My town, Tucson, Ariz., has become famous for a simple gesture in which some 8,000 people wearing red, white or blue T-shirts assembled themselves in the shape of a flag on a baseball field and had their photograph taken from above. That picture has begun to turn up everywhere, but we saw it first on our newspaper's front page. Our family stood in silence for a minute looking at that photo of a human flag, trying to know what to make of it. Then my teenage daughter, who has a quick mind for numbers and a sensitive heart, did an interesting thing. She laid her hand over a quarter of the picture, leaving visible more or less 6,000 people, and said, "That many are dead."
We stared at what that looked like -- all those innocent souls, multi-colored and packed into a conjoined destiny -- and shuddered at the one simple truth behind all the noise, which is that so many beloved people have suddenly gone from us. That is my flag, and that's what it means: We're all just people together.
Sometimes I might even agree with her (well, probably).
I can't see the ambiguity she complains about, though. Not in this case. She should ask herself which flag gets burnt in the whipped-up demonstrations in Quetta - and, if she doesn't know, which flag, which nation was chosen as the symbol worthy of mass murder...
<edit> finally a Life etc. grub :) |
