Human Dignity

On Saturday, we were gathered at our aunt's house. She was telling her niece from Adhamiya that she wanted to go gold shopping with her. 'L' said, "Sure, whenever you come over, I'll take you out. But I don't know if you'll be okay with all the corpses lying around, I've gotten used to them."
I was pretty shocked by her statement. So I asked her what she meant. 'L' is a 23 year old mother of two. She told me that next to her house it has become a dumping ground for corpses. Everyday, two or three dead bodies turn up a few steps from her gate. And they lie around for a couple of days before Iraqi security forces come and 'load them into the back of pick up trucks. People are too scared to report these dumpings. Sometimes you see just killed bodies, in the position they fell after being shot. '
She was telling me how one day they decided to take a different road when leaving their house so they wouldn't see any corpses. That didn't work, and her 3 1/2 year old son and 2 year old daughter were still exposed to these images.
I asked her if her son realized what he was seeing. She told me that he would go to his great grandmother's house and describe to her, 'the poor dead people' he saw in the street.
Wow, the horror of how cheap human life has become. To kill a person, and then dump him in any old place, not caring what happened to him. And to do it, day after day, without any security forces hunting you down- so wrong.