Twice now today I’ve pulled into a parking spot while running errands and let the car run while listening to the radio. NPR had two good interviews today, the first with Geek Squad techie guru Robert Stephens. Basically he’s fielding stupid computer question calls, which was just fun to hear. Next up was the failed presidential bid of General Wesley Clark.

Clark was especially interesting to hear, given his military background and anti-Iraq war stance. It was also intriguing to hear his thoughts about getting into the presidential bid. The funniest moment was when he talked about making the decision to run. His wife went for a walk and told him he better make up his mind by the time she got back. He sat down and read his favorite Psalms and then prayed. And he got nothing. The way he build it up was great (I’m not doing it any justice).

The school shooting in Red Lake, Minn. yesterday that left 10 dead and 12 wounded is just plain depressing. It’s sad that nearly six years after Columbine these things continue to happen.

What’s most distressing is the description of the shooter from a student. She describes what seem like obvious cries for help that seem to have gone ignored:

[Jeff] Weise was into goth culture, [17-year-old Sondra Hegstrom] said, wore “a big old black trench coat,” drew pictures of skeletons, listened to heavy metal music and “talked about death all the time.”

A couple of his friends had said he was suicidal, she said, and Hegstrom quoted his friends as saying they were watching a movie once when he said, “That would be cool if I shot up the school.”

“They didn’t think anything of it,” Hegstrom said, but “he got terrorized a lot.” He was called names and people thought he was weird. “I’m still trembling,” she said late last night. “I just can’t believe this stuff is happening.”

Who knows how much of that is true. Goth culture, video games and Marilyn Manson were quickly blamed after Columbine, but I don’t think those charges stuck. What does seem to be consistent is teens being “terrorized,” to use Hegstrom’s words. It’s sad that a teen in that position would turn to a bloody rampage to solve their problems. When something like that happens it’s clear society as a whole is dropping the ball on so many fronts.

On their tour of southeast Asia former President Bill Clinton offered to let former President George H.W. Bush have the only bed on their airplane. Clinton crashed on the floor out of respect for his 80-year-old predecessor.

That’s a great offbeat news story, but wouldn’t it have been perfect if Clinton and Bush shared the bed? The perfect presidential odd couple.

A tiger shark chomped off 13-year-old Bethany Hamilton’s left arm while she surfed the waters of Kauai, Hawaii on October 31, 2003. But the media frenzy has been just as intense. Now her family struggles with the interviews, the book deals, and the TV offers — all the trappings of 15 minutes of fame.

But as other death-defying hero stories play the media circuit and bow out, Hamilton continues to draw attention, even though she’d rather surf. She calls the one-and-half-inch stump on her left side “Stumpy,” and she doesn’t like to wear her prosthetic arm. She has wise words about courage (“Courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid. Courage means you don’t let fear stop you.” Guideposts for Teens, June/July 2004) and isn’t going to let something like a missing arm slow her down (“I know not everyone believes in a guiding hand. Sometimes it’s really hard to see — like when things aren’t going your way. But this was God’s plan for my life, and I’m going to go with it.”).

You can’t really avoid the talk in the news about the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Gharaib prison at the hands of U.S. soldiers. The digital pictures and videos make the incidents impossible to ignore, yet another impact of technology and our fast food media culture. While they’re not excusable, I imagine these kind of abuses have long existed beside war. Technology is only giving us a front row seat to atrocity.

As I read the articles and hear the reports, I’m struggling with how to respond. At times I feel like I’m witnessing another milestone that will make it into a thick and dusty volume of history ages from now. This type of incident is a turning point in history, like Sept. 11, a rallying cry, a tipping point, that first lethal spark. Unfortunately, it’s a spark for all kinds of bad things like hatred, revenge, and more fighting.

The U.S. military amazes me sometimes. For all our billion dollars of equipment, for all our capabilities to blow up a needle in a haystack from miles away, for our medical advances that save soldiers as good as dead in previous wars — for all of that, we stumble against ragtag guerillas, we’re tripped up by improvised bombs, we can’t maintain peace, and we can’t run a simple prison. I know it’s more complicated than all of that, but it amazes me. How can we invest so much in the latest technology, but we don’t bother to properly train prison guards? Or if we do allow that to happen, why is it that it continues for months until digital pictures are leaked to CBS? Then suddenly people care.

This is a sad time for our country. Justification for this war has been a hard fought case, the insurrection that followed didn’t help, and now we find incredible abuse within the ranks that ruins any rapport we had built with the Iraqis. While we can’t just pull out, part of me wishes we would.

I find the Christian responses intriguing, some condemning, some calling for Rumsfield’s resignation, some arguing about whether or not this is a case of a few bad apples, and others even throwing election year bombs and arguging about the role of women in the military. But I most resonate with Richard Mouw, Fuller Seminary President, talking about original sin:

“When I recoil in horror, then, at the sight of American soldiers torturing Iraqi and Afghan prisoners, it is not because I am witnessing an evil that is unfathomable to me. That kind of evil is all too familiar to me. I see it lurking inside me, and once again I cry out to God for mercy and forgivenness, on my own behalf as well as for people whose misdeeds right now have become a matter of public record.

“As a Christian, I certainly do not believe that our only recourse is a fatalistic acceptance of the reality of evil. Both my theology and my experience tell me that divine grace is possible. Humans can, with God’s help, resist doing the evil that might come “naturally” in horrific wartime situations. And, with grace, we can be forgiven for even the most depraved sins against our fellow human beings. With repentance, great sinners can recreate their moral lives.

“This is an important time for the American people to admit to the rest of the world that, though we often act like we are morally superior to the rest of the human race, we are as capable as anyone else of horrible acts of injustice.” (link via Bloggedy Blog)

This world is a broken place, and despite our perceived military might, our economic muscle, and our moral superiority, we are a broken people. To the Iraqis, Muslims, Arabs, and the world at large, I apologize. Words probably mean nothing in the face of such actions, but they’re all I have. I am dismayed that my nation steps forward against such odds with such noble and worthy goals, only to fall in the same places others have failed.

Powerful words about freeing Iraqis from the tortures of Saddam Hussien now ring hollow and bitter. We have replaced one tyrant for another. We closed the terrible Abu Ghraib prison where Saddam brutally tortured his people, and then reopened it for more of the same.

May God have mercy on our souls: the terrorists, the soldiers, the prisoners, the presidents, the civilians, the children, and me.

In a vaguely related story, photos of caskets of U.S. troops killed in Iraq have been released. It took a court action to get the Pentagon to release the photos, and after 350 such photos appeared online (though I haven’t been able to load the site), the Pentagon has had an “information crackdown.”

In a related story, a cargo worker was fired after her photos of U.S coffins appeared in the Seattle Times.

Apparently there’s been a long standing policy of not giving the press access to Dover Air Force base where the bodies of slain soldiers return. Part of it is out of respect for the dead, but the many protesters claim it’s a way to keep the casualty reports out of the news and out of the public mind. Caskets on the 6 o’clock news is not the best way to gain support for a war. At the same time, those caskets remind us of the cost of such an action. Right now the U.S. is at war, but we pay no personal cost, save for billions in debt and those in military service. The rest of us are detached and uninvolved in a war that’s claimed 700 U.S. lives (not to mention the thousands of Iraqis killed).

While I can see the difficulties on both sides of this debate, it’s another issue of press censorship by the government. And it’s incredibly eerie to see this story right next to North Korea’s media blackout.

Yesterday something happened in North Korea and “hundreds, possibly thousands of people were killed or injured.” CNN.com had the breaking news, but details were slim. The Command Post had a few more details, but not much. I didn’t catch another report until just before bed when I checked CNN again, and they still didn’t know anything.

This morning there’s a report of 100 dead and 1,200 injured (or 54 confirmed dead and 1,200 injured, BBC). The current theory is that a live electrical wire came in contact with a train car carrying explosives for a construction project, but the whole event is shrouded in mystery.

It’s amazing to me that we have so little news about what’s happening. I haven’t seen a single current picture. Most of that can probably be chalked up to North Korea’s intense secrecy, where the state-controlled media hasn’t even reported on the accident yet. How bizarrre is that? It’s even freakier that many news outlets haven’t given the story full coverage simply because the details are sketchy, essentially self-imposing North Korea’s virtual media blackout.

With initial reports claiming 3,000 dead or injured and North Korean leader Kim Jong-Il at the crash site “only hours” before (now reported to be 9 hours before), this incident could have been strikingly similar to 9/11. But compare the media response. One event has total, complete, round-the-clock coverage, complete with footage of planes crashing into buildings, people falling from the sky, and firefighters rushing to their death. Another event has scant details and a map with an arrow. Granted the events are turning out to be on a completely different scale, but the implications of such a media blackout are frightening.

Weather people are stupid. On Friday the local news was having a field day about the enormous blizzard that was supposed to come down on the Twin Cities, rendering us immobile. Entire newscasts were consumed with the coming weather, including interviews with plough drivers and on location reports with snow-making machines demonstrating blizzard conditions.

Last night it began. We had a snowball fight.

This morning I woke up to maybe three inches on the ground. It’s still snowing, and they say we could up to six inches, but this is a joke. What blizzard? I can’t stand it when the news media gets fixated on something beyond all measure of sanity.