It appears as if the 4000th U.S. human has just shuffled off this mortal coil in Iraq, and I find myself distressed over the fact that I'm having a hard time summoning any additional rage and fervor and sadness and indignant righteousness beyond what I already feel regarding this insane and tragic "war".

Part of that is undoubtedly due to the fact that 16 years (mis)spent in the Computer Arts and Sciences has rendered me somewhat immune to the charms of the usual base-10 numeric milestones that we humans find so beguiling - after all, their allure ultimately derives from the boring and random fact that we happen to have 10 digits on our hands and feet, and a number like 4096 is at least as elegant and useful as is a number like 4000.

But even more than that, the fact that this figure reports on U.S. deaths alone serves as a depressing reminder that this adventure has only really been made possible by our barbaric yet vital tendency to arbitrarily reduce other human beings to abstractions when it serves our emotional and intellectual purposes to do so.

The hideous fact is that we don't know - no one knows -  how many non-American humans have died because we allowed ourselves to marinate in our worst authoritarian and tribalist instincts. No one knows how to even begin to estimate the number of wounded, shattered, terrorized, and displaced humans, who actually have really lived through the kinds of experiences that will scar their lives forever, while we the lucky read about it in the papers and on our computers and get all worked up - really really mad - about it.

Whatever that number is, I rather doubt that it's a nice elegant round base-10 number, like 4000.

The good news, I suppose, is that most of them are distant, brown, exotic, frightening, and abstract humans.  So I guess that it's something that we can live with. I mean, what choice do we have?

Don't get me wrong - I'm glad that we humans can abstract away other humans this way. I mean, it's not like I have enough time or energy or money to defend and protect and love and care for a whole lot more then the small circle of humans that are currently related to me, or that affect my life in a direct, non-abstract fashion. At least, not with the the concrete, reified passion that I devote to my family and friends, with whom I have had opportunity to create an actual human connection (whatever that is, anyway).

And it's useful, obviously, for individuals and entire populations to abstract away the true enemies who truly do seek to harm them. I mean, it's not like I want to abdicate my "right" to self-defense. I ain't no milquetoast Nancy-Boy pacifist hippie. I'm glad, for example, that my American forbears managed to abstract away those hideous Nazi stormtroopers who carried Hitler's flag, as well as those awful citizens of Dresden and Hamburg and Berlin who enabled them.

But the problem is that these shattered humans in Iraq and Afghanistan are not, for the most part, my mortal enemy. The vast majority of them are caught up in an epic struggle that only peripherally affects me, mostly economically at that - and even then, any individual one of them, even the worst of the explosive-wearing ululating terror-merchants, is surely less of an indirect threat to me and my interests than is, say, King Abdullah of the Royal House of Saud. So it's just a little harder to abstract them away, even though they are brown and dirty and scary and undoubtedly smell vaguely of fanaticism and curry. Or at least, it ought to be harder.

However, abstract them away I must, because to be perfectly honest, my puny human brain can't really even comprehend suffering on this scale. Millions of people, ruined for all intents and purposes. Millions. I mean, It would take all day just to make a list of 200 people that I know!

Thing is, those who are valiantly fighting my non-enemies over there are just as abstract to me, even though most of them look and talk and live approximately like me and some of them probably even come from my home town and maybe even went to the church that I attended as a youth. Try as I might, I just can't seem to properly weigh their lives as more valuable than those of the scary brown people, or the grief and agony of their loved ones as any less valid and legitimate then that of their exotic counterparts overseas. It's not their fault, but I don't think that it's mine either.

I mean, I do feel profound gratitude that many of them believe passionately that they are fighting for me, a non-abstract person with whom they have never even had the good fortune to become acquainted. I love them for that. But I can't shake the knowledge, the nearly unbearable fact, that they are not actually fighting my non-enemies for me. At most, they are fighting for my government. And I didn't even vote for the rat bastards.

And many of those exotic non-enemies dying overseas on my behalf are just as convinced that they are fighting for unknown, non-abstract people as well, and are thus just as worthy of their protectorate's love. It really can't be avoided. Such is war.

So I guess I'll mark today the same way that I have all of the other bleak days in this abominable, abstract atrocity. I feel sad, and my sadness has more than 4000 facets. But my kid is starring in a school play this afternoon, and I'll remember the happiness and pride that I feel when she takes her bow more than I will today's sadness over of all that abstract foreign loss. I'm not proud of that fact, but I can't honestly deny it, either. I know in my heart that I don't have any right whatsoever to be so fortunate, but again, what real choice do I have?

I can only hope that, even given their distant abstractness, we can nonetheless someday come to some sort of a collective decision that all of those humans over there and over here really do matter. Every single Goddamn non-abstract one of them.