Moving DKos Post: "My English Teacher's Daughter Abducted In Iraq"

[Hissyspit]

http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/1/10/203710/680

My English Teacher's Daughter Has Been Abducted in Iraq
by Tiki
Tue Jan 10, 2006 at 06:37:10 PM PDT
Mrs. Mary Beth Carroll was my senior year Honors Humanities teacher. Humanities is a course unique to my school, which is offered only to seniors. It encompasses all of the liberal arts, examined from a historical and analytical perspective. It was reported on Monday that her daughter, Jill, had been kidnapped.

CNN Link

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When I knew Mrs. Carroll she was an intellectual, gray-haired divorcée on the verge of retirement. I was a student in her last Humanities class. I will alyways remember her for her insightful nature, brilliant personality, and caring demeanor. Honors Humanities was not a class for the meek, and I am certainly no straight-A student, but it challenged us to think in new dimensions and to reach outside our comfort zone. Lectures ranged from Catholicism to jazz, from Japanese wood block prints to existentialism, and even hands-on activities like Jewish folk dancing. It was team taught, with students in small groups of less than 30 being taught by an individual teacher, and large group days where class was taught in a more collegiate format. On the first day of class, Mrs. Carroll offered us a challenge: without lifting your pencil off of a sheet of paper, draw a circle with a dot in the center of it and no line connecting it. When we finally had it figured out, she explained to us that we must to learn to think creatively in order to solve the world problems that her generation had not been able to. (If it's really going to drive you nuts, the trick is to fold the paper.)

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Today, my ex-girlfriend, who is now a senior and in Honors Humanities as well, told me that Mrs. Carroll's daughter had been abducted in Iraq. Immediately, my stomach dropped. It's so funny, because we can go through life where nothing in the "big picture" affects us at all. I can only imagine what Mrs. Carroll is now going through, and my heart aches just thinking about the pain and uncertainty. They already killed Jill's interpreter; clearly, they are serious about killing her as well. I am reminded of the time when Iraqi terrorists put a video out on the internet where they cut a man's head off, and I can't even fathom the pain of that man's loved ones. I can't even fathom Mrs. Carroll's pain.

Nothing will make you more angry or more sad than when the agonizing wrong of this war and this government poisons someone's heart, whether it is yours or someone who you care about. For me, the war in Iraq is no longer an abstraction. It is Mrs. Carroll's pain and worry. It is my sorrow for her and her daughter, my sorrow for one of the best educators, if not the best educator, that I have ever encountered.

MORE DIARY AT LINK

[0007]

1. I can relate to the feelings. I was watching PBS one evening,

at the end of the program Jim Lehrer list the soldiers who died in Iraq.
One of the soldiers was my next door neighbor, that my son use to play with while growing up.

[Hissyspit]

2. That's a moving story in and of itself. Remember the right-wingers

who initially fought efforts to broadcast memorials to those soldiers? They seem even more pathetic now than they used to...