1,800 Iraqis were killed in August. Did you know that? Do you think that's high or low compared to other months? How many Iraqis do you think have been killed since we invaded Iraq? Do you know how many Americans soldiers lost their lives (legs, arms, sight) last month in Iraq?

Don't know?

How many days did Paris Hilton serve in jail? How many hours did Nicole Richie spend in jail? What's the latest with Lindsay Lohan? The Brittany Spears, Kevin Federline custody battle? What was Larry Craig reaching for, according to him, when his hand came under the stall in the men's room in the airport?

If you know more about the second group than the first, it's not surprising. We get a lot more information from every conceivable media source on all of the entertainment gossip, the political scandal, and anything else they can throw in to distract us from the massive human calamity that is occurring every single day in a country that we broke and we bear responsibility for fixing.

Write to your media sources and tell them you want to know more. The gruesome photos from Vietnam on our evening news broadcasts (notice they weren't shows back then!) and the never-ending shots of body bags coming back to America bearing our young soliders were what finally persuaded the American public that a war we couldn't win, must be stopped.

Kudos to Director Brian De Palma whose new film "Redacted" contains photos that newspapers refused to print as well as footage dowloaded from the Internet, including soldiers' home videos. 'The movie is an attempt to bring the reality of what's happening in Iraq to the American people," said De Palma, director of movies such as Carrie and Scarface. "Unlike Vietnam, when we saw the destruction and sorrow of the people we were maiming and killing, and soldiers coming home in body bags, we see none of that in this war. 'It's all out there on the Internet, you can find it if you look for it, but it's not in the mainstream media. The media is now part of the corporate establishment. The terrible thing about this war is we don't see these images, we don't have these stories.'

Remember this, probably the most famous image of Vietnam. It worked. The American public were incensed. A picture tells a thousand words.

Gillian Parrillo
The Sacramento Executive