Wednesday, August 08, 2007

I lose stuff too, but it's never really been that bad

I can appreciate that it is generally difficult to sometimes keep track of things, particularly when you try and move a lot of stuff at once. I seem to have left a souvenir at every hotel I've stayed at (a little gift to the maids, maybe, if you will). But it is 99 percent of the time, little things that didn't really make it too high on my list of priorities. I have a few things that seem valuable to me, so I make it a point to keep track of them. Cell phone? Check. Ipod? Check. Sunny Care Bear flip-flops I found for less then a buck in LA? Check. If I had a gun, or something with the possibility to kill mass people, that would also totally make that list.

So, it really confuses me when it's revealed that, (a) about two hundred thousand things with the potential to kill people are missing, and (b) it takes about two years for this to really be realized. When this first broke, I figured that I must grossly be underestimating how much weapons are being used in the first place. Several different sources are phrasing it as thirty percent though. We don't know where almost a third of our weapons are?? I need to find a word that means even less then incompetent, because this is so far below that word. Incompetent is the word I use to describe the new waitress's ability to effectively clean dishes. I need something greater when I try and conceptualize what not knowing where this many AK-47s are means.

What makes me even more shocked, is that a lot of folks when they talk about how frustrated it makes them, center an anger not at the damage said weapons could, and probably are, doing; but that their tax dollars are being wasted. I think about money fairly often; a lot of people on tight budgets probably do. But it is a new low of the American egotistical psyche to hear about loss weapons in Iraq, and to be worried about their wallet, not about the people who are most likely being shot because we have so much shit over in Iraq, we can't keep track of it.