Soapbox

Hotel Tehran?

I didn’t see it that day, or I’d have been all dandered up a few days ago. But this damn cartoon in the Columbus Dispatch made national media, it was so bad. It was a map of the middle east with a big drain like a shower floor labeled "Iran" with hundreds of cockroaches scurrying into it.

OK, I wax a little melodramatic here, but I thought the subject called for it.
Welcome to America, the home of the brave.

Editor

When the Rwandan genocide reared its ugly head and the waters of that nation ran red for months, the voices of evil that whispered and shouted from the radio urged their fellow Hutus to "kill the Cockroaches!" And so encouraged, relieved of guilt because what they exterminated was, after all, less than human- they slaughtered their own friends and neighbors by the thousands. They dragged them out of their beds, out of their schools and churches, and they hacked them to bits, because they were cockroaches.

Here in civilized America we shuddered at the news, called it "barbaric" and wondered how people could be like that? How backward that Rwanda must be!

And this week the Columbus Dispatch printed a cartoon which whispered that Americans should think of Iran not as a nation whose government we have serious differences with, not as a people who might also be suffering under a war-mongering leader who does not listen to their wishes- but as cockroaches. Vermin, scurrying into the darkness.

And when the rivers of the middle east run red, will you have a cartoon about that too?