a year and a half ago, on my way to work, i passed through a food court to get a blueberry sugar bagel for breakfast. the multi-tv screen display was showing over and over footage of planes flying into the world trade center buildings.

this afternoon, by coincidence, i went into the same food court after a trip to art express at the art gallery. lunchfolk gathered around the tvs; missiles had just fallen in… on iraq. oddly, a reuters cameraman was there filming the tv footage — maybe he had missed the plane to the gulf, or flunked out of the military-run media training sessions.

i asked the girl i was having lunch with if she would go to the rally on sunday (12.30pm, belmore park, sydney), which led to a discussion on whether or not war was the right thing to do, and why we shouldn’t just accept that these things happen. i was having trouble following her argument on why “collateral damage” was, y’know, fine, when the bombs would get rid of an evil dictator in the end. obviously it was fine because it’s an anonymous bunch of dusty, brown people on the other side of the world who don’t hold western values.

i said, it’s like when you were at school and there was this one bad girl in class, and the teacher punished the whole class for something the one bad girl did.

the girl i had lunch with said, oh! well when you put it that way…