Common Ground: What is a Thousand?

October 2004 | Journeys

What is a Thousand?

A Thousand U.S. soldiers dead and a thousand candles at a vigil. Our anguish should not be our only response.

by Tai Moses

We were participating in that most ancient of human rituals — communal mourning. Strangers sharing the lighting of candles and mingling of flames, our thoughts unified by a single theme: grief for the dead and longing for peace.

Like thousands of other Americans, I attended a candlelight vigil on Thursday, Sept. 9 to remember the more than 1,000 U.S. service members killed in Iraq and the tens of thousands of Iraqi dead. Coordinated by MoveOn.org, Win Without War, and other groups, the silent vigils were held in 900 cities and drew upwards of 40,000 people.

Nearly 250 people from Oakland’s Lake Merritt neighborhood gathered at the colonnade on the edge of the lake to stand quietly, candles in hand. They stood with heads bowed over their candles or gazing out across the water as the silent moments ticked by. A few held placards reading “1,000 Dead,” “Quagmire,” or “No End In Sight.” The dark silhouette of a bird flew overhead. A few early stars came out. When the breeze blowing off the lake made some of the flames flicker and die, people passed around butane lighters and relit their candles.

I searched the expressions of my neighbors. What were we thinking about, during those 45 wordless minutes? What went on in our private, innermost thoughts?

I reflected on the number 1,000. We have been bracing for it all summer, just as last year, in Oakland, we awaited news of the 100th murder and the year before, San Francisco stood watch for the 1,000th jumper from the Golden Gate Bridge. Milestones seem to acquire a power of their own. We use them to shock ourselves into a heightened state of awareness, or to move us from complacency to action.

What is 1,000? It is an iconic number that gives the media a fresh prism through which to view the war. One thousand, said political scientist David Birdsell, “is a gripping number, a large number, a tragic number, and it will be a pivot to revisit Bush’s reasons for fighting the war.” The Houston Chronicle called it “a bloody threshold.” Of course, 999 is just as bloody. And no sooner was the toll of 1,000 announced than it became obsolete, with more fatalities bringing the actual number to 1,006 by Friday morning.

The arithmetic serves its symbolic purpose; yet we tend to be far more moved by the story of a single individual than by the numbers. The Pentagon has not yet released the name of the soldier who had the grim honor of being the 1,000th to die in Iraq. All we know of him is that he was with the 1st Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, Texas, and he died fighting in the streets of Baghdad.

What is 1,000? In Japan, 1,000 paper cranes has become a worldwide symbol of peace, demonstrating the power of a single person to create change. According to Japanese myth, the gods will grant the wish of one who folds 1,000 cranes. There is a website called One Thousand Reasons (www.thousandreasons.org), which categorizes (by issue, alphabetically or chronologically) 1,000 failures of the Bush presidency. More than 1,000 days have passed since the World Trade Center towers fell. In essence, for each day since then, the president has sacrificed the life of an American service member. We are fed the detritus of 9/11, the fear and the paranoia, day after day, but in that battered memory there is no nourishment for our nation.

Standing by the lake, surrounded by my neighbors, I felt a sense of solidarity, but I felt something else too; the stirrings of deep anger. Americans and Iraqis are dying horrific deaths every day, and we who want peace are not doing enough.

Some Americans who are starting to get angry enough to do something about it are the military families. Ruby Savage’s grandson, Jeremiah, died in Fallujah on May 12. Here’s what she thinks of 1,000: “I’m mad, just plain mad,’’ she told her local paper, The Tennessean. ‘’We’re ready for them all to come home, and not in a box, either. I don’t know how much higher it will go. I can’t tell, but it’s senseless. It hurts.”

Brooke Campbell, whose 25-year-old brother, Ryan, was killed in Iraq in April, wrote in a lacerating letter to George W. Bush, “Not only did you cheat him of a long meaningful life, but you cheated him of a meaningful death.”

When the 45 minutes were up, people quietly snuffed out their candles and turned to look at each other. Rueful smiles were offered, farewells exchanged, and slowly, the crowd dispersed, melting into the darkness.

As the significance of 1,000 fades, the death toll will cease to be front-page news. One thousand means nothing — as in, it is a terrible thing to die for nothing. And 1,000 means everything — everything that is at stake.

One thousand candles, 1,000 coffins. More than 7,000 troops wounded. As for the 11,000 Iraqi dead and ten times that many injured, there aren’t enough candles in this city to commemorate them. Our anguish at this appalling loss of life is the appropriate response. It should not be our only response.

Oakland writer Tai Moses is a contributing editor of AlterNet.org.

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