In a message dated 7/29/2007 4:57:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,  
[log in to unmask] writes:

How to  make art and poems that move beyond the
silence is the  issue.



It is not "artful" nor is it "poetic" to desecrate a grave - no matter how  
temporarily.  
 
My father, my uncles and the father's of my children all lie in your  
targeted "military" graves.  As a mother of sons I am ever aware that  someday my 
children, themselves, God forbid, may also rest in a military  cemetery.  Will I 
find it poetic or artistic to discover that a  stranger such as yourself has 
left a picture of a dead anyone else covering the  only concrete remembrance 
they have left behind in this world - their name  and the engraved memory of 
their too-short time on  earth? 
 
Remember the Iraqi dead any other way you wish - but do not do it  at the 
expense of your own dead.   You are a rare person  indeed if you do not have one 
single family member or acquaintance who has died  in a war, past or present, 
which was not of their own  making.    I am aware, like any sane and 
compassionate individual  is aware, that every Iraqi dead belonged to someone - 
apparently you do not  share the same awareness that each dead American, each dead 
Australian, each  dead Englishman also belongs to someone -and that those 
families grieve every  bit as much as the Iraqi families grieve.  
 
To use the grief of any one of those families, including using  pictures of 
dead Iraqi without permission, to justify your own disgust  with a war is a 
travesty.  How do you justify causing still more  pain to people who have already 
suffered the ultimate pain?
 
You show not "outrage" but nothing more than a shocking lack of  compassion 
by using the graves of strangers to call attention to the deaths  of still 
other strangers.  By doing so you rashly assume that the first  group was somehow 
not as innocent as the second group.  Where is the  sense in covering the 
headstone of a veteran a World War II with the face of a  dead Iraqi child?  By 
doing so have you expressed "outrage" or  "ignorance?"  By covering the grave of 
a ghetto child from Detroit who  joined the army because he needed a way to 
feed his family with the face  of a dead Iraqi mother who was on the way to the 
store to find food  with which to feed her family, do you express "righteous  
indignation" or do you merely show that you are incapable of understanding 
that  the word "victim" applies equally to all?
 
Have the balls to lay your outrage where it belongs - on the steps of the  
White House. - not on the graves of someone's husband or someone's father or  
someone's child.  It's your own indignation you're most concerned with  
expressing - not theirs.  You know nothing of their indignation - or  of them.  By 
superimposing one over the other you are not  "acknowledging" them together - you 
are "using" them together.  Neither are  you acknowledging them as "both 
victims of this insanity"  but rather you  are further victimizing them by using 
their faces and their grave without their  permission.
 
You want to show off your poetic or your artistic talent to fight a war -  
that's fine.  Do it.  Be big enough and smart and "artistic"  enough  to find a 
way to do it at your own expense, not theirs.
 
Lo
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



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