Actually, that invisible realm of feeling we talked about earlier used to have a name. It used to be called "The Soul". But then some very wise men, our cultural and economic leaders, decided that things that cannot be counted don't exist. Thus we abolished the soul and replaced it with money.
Money can be counted.
Feelings cannot.
If you remove the soul, all you have left is a body. And there are plenty of bodies around in our world right now: not just the one hundred and fifty thousand or more created by the Asian Tsunami, but possibly up to one hundred thousand in Iraq. Too many to be counted, too many to be understood since the beginning of hostilities in that poor, sad, beleaguered nation.
We can't say, exactly, how many bodies there are in Iraq, as, unfortunately, the Coalition Forces seem to have forgotten how to count, at least when it comes to Iraqi bodies. We know how to count British and American bodies, of course, but for some reason, Iraqi bodies cannot be counted.
Perhaps they never counted before, even when they were alive.
So, here are some more figures.
Try this. One hundred and forty-three billion dollars. That's one hundred and forty-three thousand million, or one hundred and forty-three thousand thousand thousand.
That's how much the first year of the war in Iraq cost the American people, according to a BBC report on the sixth of April 2004.
I just ran it through my calculator.
That's three hundred and ninety one million, seven hundred and eighty thousand, eight hundred and twenty-two dollars a day, or sixteen million, three hundred and twenty four thousand, two hundred and one dollars an hour.
So far the US government has pledged five hundred and fifty million dollars to the Tsunami relief fund.
In other words, the US government's pledge to the victims of the Tsunami in Asia amounts to about thirty three hours (give or take) of the value of their time spent in Iraq.
Killing people is obviously much, much more important.
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