Selves and Others

It was kind of 60s-70s Miami Beach demographics in 40s Newark at the Seth Boyden Housing Project, I guess. And when I was a kid in that Euclidean asylum, my mom —God bless ’er— used to wake me up every morning with the wrenching question: "Richie, do you know who died today?" Probably, it wasn’t anything like every day. But the impression stuck. And now —now that I’ve been conditioned to mark such anniversaires for so long— I’m able to share with you...who died yesterday...in more ways than one...but for good reasons.

(...)

We are preparing now for lock down. I have this sense that perhaps a prison guard has in an American high security prison. I’ve seen it in the movies. The prisoners are causing too much trouble and you hear the heavy black boots of the guards stomp down the iron corridors. Then one of them shouts “lock down!” or some other phrase that hides the brutality of what is about to happen. Someone else pulls a huge switch and the sound of metal clanking metal is awesome. (...)

HALABJA, Iraq, April 11 - For years Nuradeen Ghreeb has dreamed of bringing clean drinking water to his hometown. That town happens to be Halabja, where 17 years ago he and his parents cowered in a basement as Saddam Hussein’s airplanes attacked with chemical weapons, killing at least 5,000 people.

But on Sunday, Mr. Nuradeen learned that his dream was over, because the United States had canceled the water project it had planned here as part of a vast effort to rebuild Iraq after the 2003 invasion. Ordinarily a quiet and reserved civil engineer, he sat on one of his beloved water pipes on hearing the news and wept, his tears glistening in the afternoon sun.

"If the Americans think that training the Iraqi Army comes before clean drinking water for the people of Halabja," he said quietly, "then we can’t expect anything from them." (...)