Permit me to state some obvious things. All “obvious things” are not always observable. Most of us do not really look and see all that can be seen around us. We filter the mass out to focus in on what interests us or that call us to attend something new or novel and certainly colorful and loud. My hearing filters out most of the “white noise” of background babble and grating sounds that mechanical living brings along with it. There is a roar that goes on that I am only aware of when I wear my hearing aids and I know that I am not getting the full “benefit” of hearing it all. It is not obvious to people that I cannot hear until I cup my ear and ask “what did you say?” or as the mostly deaf funny man Marty Ryan used to bellow, “WHAT?” back in his studio at Monmouth U. Deaf people are not obvious until they look at you strangely before answering, perhaps irrelevantly, or gesture with their hands in sign language. That latter is “obvious”.
All obvious things are not always observable because we are not looking for them. They sometimes hide in the headlines of newspapers, for instance. One example today in the NY Times is the notation that military spending “easily” passed the Senate vote. Another is the contrasting headline of an article buried in the center of the paper that the White House and the Senate have an unresolved “impasse” over how to handle disputes that involve lawsuits against H.M.O.s.
To paraphrase an observation made by Martin Luther King concerning money not voted to control the explosion of the rat population in Ghetto areas, “It appears that the Senate loves killing foreigners over saving the rights of patients.” And thereby we have an account of why we miss obvious things.
It is obvious to me that our enraged President, just like Pope Pius 12 back during the BIG war, gets duly angered when HIS people are harmed. The Pope back then took no obvious steps to intervene with Hitler’s actions against the Jews – that was merely eradicating a whole people and their religion. The Pope, however, was driven to protest when Catholic individuals or the Catholic Church in a particular action against them was brought to his attention. Hitler’s captive Jews in lands he invaded were just as important as his military actions. They had to be killed either immediately or a bit later in places set up for mass annihilation. We called it murder then and it is murder now whether it is by soldiers attacking civilians or “suicide” murderers who blow themselves up amongst innocent civilians.
Our President, George W. Bush, took a long time to point out the differences between the Jews in Israel and the Arab population in Palestine. It was not until the students in Hebrew University were victims of a mass murder that he made headlines.
The President of the largest “democracy” in the world should be outspoken every time anarchic and terror minded murderers kill innocents anywhere.