Americans Don’t Care About the Iraqi Dead. They Don’t Even Care About Their Own.

Peter Maass, The Intercept_:

Until Covid-19 came along, I thought the willful ignorance of Iraqi casualties was principally a matter of Americans not caring about the deaths of foreigners, especially those who are not white and not Christian. And that’s certainly true: We don’t care enough about those deaths, even if (or especially if) we are responsible for them. But the larger truth is that we also don’t even care about the deaths of our own citizens. Choices have been made that caused America to have one of the highest per-capita rates of Covid deaths, with more than a million dying so far, and probably another 100,000 dying this year. The numbers tick upward, but most of us hardly notice.

In addition to the Covid toll, there is also the violence America inflicts on itself with guns, cars, opioids, and a predatory health care system that yields the highest maternal mortality rate among the world’s richest nations. We are an exceptional nation but not in the way we have been told: America kills its own at rates that are far higher than peer nations. The situation is getting worse, not better, because life expectancy in the U.S. is plummeting while in comparable countries it is increasing.