Imagine that everyone in Boston is dead. All 589,141 of the people who live within the city limits have perished over the past three and a half years.
The North End is eerily scentless, the restaurants boarded shut or blown open.
Newbury Street echoes, its sidewalks hauntingly empty, its storefronts disturbingly dark.
The windows of the Hancock building are broken again, but this time not through an architectural mix-up, but through a series of explosions, all planned and executed by the people living within the city itself.
While it’s frightening to imagine, it’s also inconceivable.
How could 600,000 people die all at once? That couldn’t happen, even in three and a half years.
Right?
According to a study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, 600,000 civilians have died violently in Iraq since the Iraqi conflict began in 2003. While there is some controversy surrounding the study’s large margin of error, it is still shocking. It is still unbelievably higher than the arbitrary estimate of 50,000 that the Bush administration offered.
Even if it is only an estimate, it is still an estimate that averages out to approximately 15,000 deaths a month.
It is still a higher estimate than the highest estimate — 400,000 — of the death toll in Sudan.
But those are just numbers even if they are not entirely accurate, just like how these are just a few easily smeared words on conveniently recyclable paper. Let’s put it in human terms.
Let’s imagine that in March 2003, every student in Boston University died — and not from illness. They died violently — from a gunshot wound, or from being pierced in the eye by a piece of shrapnel blown from a nearby car bomb.
Then, in April 2003, the 6,649 students that attend Harvard University died in a horrific suicide bombing that wrecked all of Harvard Square — the Out-of-Town Newsstand reduced to ashes and fluttering bits of paper.
Hours later, the entire 9,019 Boston College student population bled to death after an unexplained explosion caused their dormitories to collapse, without warning, in the middle of the night.
Over the course of May 2003, all 4,053 students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were killed by roadside bombs left by insurgents along Massachusetts Avenue. The 4,595 students of Suffolk University died when they were taken hostage and executed, systematically by unidentified riflemen.
The 3,165 students attending Emerson College all unexpectedly died when several car bombs simultaneously exploded outside of their dormitories in downtown Boston. And then, in a tragic turn of events, every one of the 2,255 girls attending Wellesley College died — collateral damage from a gunfight between insurgents and U.S. forces.
Imagine trying to endure three months of horror as entire student bodies disappeared from the planet in gunfire, flames and blood. Then imagine that the horror didn’t end after three months; instead, it persisted for more than three and a half years, still with no end in sight.
Death is hard enough to deal with on an individual level. Even then, as an isolated incident, it’s like an earthquake that occurs over weeks, months and years. Even after it’s officially over, there’s still the aftershocks, the china that never stops falling from the quivering shelves, the cracks that can never be completely painted over, the screen door that never really shuts properly ever again.
And that’s when it’s expected to a certain degree. Imagine experiencing that, multiplied by 600,000 — or, even by 426,369, the lower end of the study’s margin of error — and without warning. Even within the context of an entire country, it’s impossible to think that so many deaths — roughly 2 percent of the entire population — could be coped with properly.
Where can you bury that many bodies? Who can cry for that long? What can you do with that much grief?
Remember, these are not soldiers we are talking about — although the United States alone has lost 2,765 at the time I wrote this column — these are civilians. These are people with no connection to the military or the insurgency, people whose only real mistake was that they were born in Iraq instead the United States.
These 600,000 people were separate from whether you think we should or shouldn’t be in Iraq and whether this is or isn’t a good time to remove troops. They were not related to politics and the empty, flourishing speeches that men with ambiguous intentions make in Washington, D.C. They had nothing to do with oil, no knowledge of the whereabouts of any weapons of mass destruction.
They belonged to families. They had names. They laughed or smiled uniquely. They were not unlike you as they began their day every morning, looking out of their windows onto the same sun that you look at.
These are people who died. These are people who deserved death as much as you do.
Six hundred thousand is more than a number. It is the price of war, and it is being paid by innocent people, who are dying in ways that are more horrifying than we can possibly imagine.
Is it worth it?
Megan Steffen, a sophomore in the University Professors Program, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at [email protected].