Musings

Sometimes it is difficult for me to internalize the fact that really horrible things are happening in the country in which I live. For those of you in the United States, and particularly those of you livng in DC right now, it might be tough for you to sympathize with the victims of the Holocaust Museum shooting. Part of this is because we're all inured to the violence blasted at us on a daily basis from our televisions screens, but I think more of it has to do with not being physically present at the scene. It's not that we do not care for the people who we see suffering on the nightly news, but I believe we do not feel the full impact without being at the scene (or perhaps without experiencing something similar).

In a like fashion, I find it difficult to fully comprehend the increase in violence that is happening here in Peru. I hear snippets from my friends in Lima or read about what is happening in online news forums, but it's almost not real for me. For example, in northern Peru this past week, there was a violent confrontation between indigenous Peruvians and the police, which resulted in dozens of deaths. Yet the reporting is so clinical, so statistics based. What is missing is basic human emotion, I suppose.

Yet I am so removed from these kinds of occurences while I live in my limeño bubble. The only thing that makes the news a little less removed is seeing the difficulty Anthony has in dealing with the effects of these situations. This week, for example, Anthony created a report for the Ambassador about the situation in northern Peru and he had to edit the number of photos that would accompany the report. The photos contained grisly images of Peruvian police officers hacked to death by machetes. To say the least, they were disturbing to Anthony - I imagine this is the kind of thing that makes a lasting impression on a person (to state the obvious).

For Anthony, I am sure, the reality of what is happening here in Peru is much more personal (and that feeling was only magnified by the discovery of a fetus at nearly 7 months of gestation abandoned on the embassy grounds yesterday). But that is the price that our police officers and security personnel (and military!) around the world pay to help keep us safe. They expose themselves on a regular basis to the atrocities that many of us cannot fathom and likely do not want to face (or recognize as existing) so that we can continue to live in a comfortable bubble of security.

For these reasons and more, I just want to take this moment to acknowledge the worth and dedication of our protectors, from the security guards at the Holocaust Museum and the uniformed police officers in our cities and towns, to the military men and women serving in posts worldwide and (in my case, particularly) the security officers at our embassies.