Legacy MattersIraqis Who Died While Daring to Vote Are Mourned as Martyrs by Edward Wong in the New York Times
Salim Yacoubi bent over to kiss the purple ink stain on his twin brother's right index finger, gone cold with death.
"You can see the finger with which he voted," Shukur Jasim, a friend of the dead man, said as he cast a tearful gaze on the body, sprawled across a washer's concrete slab. "He's a martyr now."
The stain marked the hard-won right to vote that Naim Rahim Yacoubi exercised Sunday, and the price he paid for that privilege
Jeremy Brown says it's Reclaiming the Word 'Martyr' and I agree. We are also reclaiming our sense of how powerful freedom is to those who never had it.
We are reclaiming and rebonding.
The rebonding of the American people with the Iraqi people that began with the personal courage shown by millions of Iraqis voting in their first election, took shape at the President's State of the Union address in the form of two women, One a mother of a soldier killed in Iraq, the other a daughter of man killed by Saddam Hussein. Grave at the cost of freedom, both touched by death, they locked in embrace.
Cormac McCarthy wrote "The closest bonds we will ever know are the bonds of grief. The deepest community is one of sorrow." Americans and Iragis are now bound with bonds of pride and grief, of gratitude and grief, more tightly than we can now appreciate. Those bonds will last for decades into the future, great legacies with great impact.
And if their men forget, their women will remind them. Women like Janet Norwood and Safia Taleb al-Shuhail.
