Lisa’s been covering the burning of Baghdad’s National Library. It’s just… I dunno. I was sorta angry about this whole going to war thing, but I’ve been more sad, than anything else about everything since.
Gilliard wrote about this (chaos) earlier on the Daily Kos. Unfortunately, it seems that it continues… See also, Juxtapositions, and Perspectives:
In 47 B.C., Julius Caesar torched ships in the port of Alexandria, and fire spread to the Great Library (known contemporaneously as “the Museum”). Later on (391 A. D. ), “riots instigated by fanatical Christians damaged the collection heavily” And in 641 A.D. “the Caliph of Baghdad exhibited the same spirit of religious fanaticism” as the restored collection was burned to heat the public baths.
Few of us know the date (or even the century) offhand, fewer still could name the players or detail the political circumstances, much less care who won … but we remember and regret the event whereby civilization lost irreplaceable clues to where we came from and how we came to be.