Two obituaries

Since everyone else is talking about this, I will be brief.

CNN reports that by its reckoning, we've passed the 2000 mark on deaths due to the Iraqi exercise. We all must go sometime, but odds are this unlucky 2000th person was someone who had barely begun to live, who hadn't even begun to figure out what mark he or she might make on the world. (Granted, there are those, including perhaps the deceased, who would say that the military service was that mark. I, with military family members, would not disagree and am not disparaging this person's sacrifice. But what more might he or she have done?)

Conversely, the soft-spoken Rosa Parks has also died, but at age 92, after literally changing the world for the better.

I leave you to mull over the possibilities of what might have been for the absent 2000.