Did you ever read something that was so startling that after you finished you felt like someone had slapped you across the face or poured ice cold water over your head? That's exactly the way I felt last night after I finished reading Bob Herbert's editorial in The New York Times. Entitled "While Iraq Burns" Herbert writes, "Americans are shopping while Iraq burns."

Over the weekend while I was cooking and cleaning for my family and relaxing at home I caught glimpses of the horror continuing to escalate in Iraq. The third year of the war that we began passed without much fan fare. The fact that the war in Iraq has now lasted longer than World War II was mentioned in several news stories But overall there was much more emphasis and play given by the main stream media to post holiday shopping, the so-called black Friday rush to pick up those big bargains and that's what Bob Herbert chose to focus on in his editorial. "There is something terribly wrong with this juxtaposition of gleeful Americans with fistfuls of dollars storming the department stores barricades and the slaughter by the thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians including old people, children and babies. The war was started by the U.S., but most Americans feel absolutely no sense of personal responsibility for it."

It's almost as if Americans are bored by this war, annoyed that they have to put up with the depressing media coverage of the war night after night while they are trying to eat dinner with their family and de-stress from their busy days. I can certainly understand the instinctual desire to turn away from painful, distressing news but I cannot condone the complete denial of responsibility and abandonment of empathy for the victims of this war of choice. Again I quote from Herbert's stunningly eloquent editorial, "With no obvious personal stake in the war in Iraq, most Americans are indifferent to its consequences. In an interview last week, Alex Racheotes, a 19-year-old history major at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, said: "I definitely don't know anyone who would want to fight in Iraq. But beyond that, I get the feeling that most people at school don't even think about the war. They're more concerned with what grade they got on yesterday's test."

Maybe that was the point that Representative Charles Rangel was trying to make by proposing that the draft be reinstated, suggesting that politicians might be more reluctant to initiate another armed conflict if there own children were subject to being called to fight. College students during the Viet Nam War were motivated to march for peace because they knew high school friends who were unable to avoid the draft or who joined voluntarily and they understood the price of war. Today's students don't seem to understand that lesson.

But whether you pay attention or not the war rages on, day after day the bodies continue to pile up. "According to the United Nations, more than 7,000 Iraqi civilians were killed in September and October. Nearly 5,000 of those killings occurred in Baghdad a staggering figure." Reporting on this war has never been more dangerous. The United Nations reports that 18 journalists were murdered in the last two months. More journalists have been killed covering this conflict than have died in any other conflict in history.

There is something incredibly sick and sad about a society that proudly calls itself a Christian nation and appears so callous and unconcerned about an exploding and seemingly unending civil war that started at our own hands. More than 3,000 of our own soldiers have died, more than 20,000 of our soldiers have been injured and tens of thousands of Iraqis have been killed in a war that has accomplished absolutely nothing and there's no end in sight.

To every single person who ever said that we can't leave Iraq because the country would immediately dissolve into chaos I say turn on the TV when you get home tonight, chaos has already taken place and we started it.