Airshow

Yesterday afternoon, my coworker and I were lazily staring at our computer screens when we heard the unmistakable sound of a fighter jet flying low in the sky. As this is unusual in Belgium, we stuck our heads outside. Two more F-16's followed, flying slowly, maybe 1000 feet off the ground. 10 seconds later an entire parade of aircraft followed, including 3 helicopters, 2 C-130 cargo planes and a passenger jet. At the tail end, another pair of F-16's followed.

Honestly, I thought it was some kind of airshow. But later on the news they showed the French state funeral of 7 soldiers killed in Afghanistan the previous week. Sarkozy was there, and they had the ceremony in a large cathedral in Paris. What we had seen earlier that day was a sort of aerial funeral procession.

I caught myself thinking that it was all a bit overdone; that it was only seven soldiers, that the US loses that many in a week quite often, that all they needed to do was flash their names across the scrolling news bar on the headline news show. And then I thought about how long it's been, how long we've been seeing those names on the scrolling news bar, and how maybe we're becoming desentized to the thought of soldiers' caskets flying home. Maybe it's not such a bad thing to see the flag-draped coffins and the grandmother crying on national TV once in awhile.