The pain that crippled one Marine cripples all of us.

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For those of us who are insulated from the fury of the war zone, and lucky enough to still be able to feel fear and dismay, this was a bad week to read the news. It was a week dominated by disturbing events.

Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice traveled to Eastern Europe, pushing a plan for a missile defense system, belligerently ignoring concerns that such a plan could threaten a fragile peace, and fueling fears that the US seeks military dominance.

Meanwhile, President George Bush created a new high-level position, which he pointedly declined to call a “war czar” although that is what everyone else in the world is calling it. The move reportedly came at the recommendation of the stridently militaristic Vice President Dick Cheney, who gleefully boasted that the new war czar would be empowered to “run roughshod” over other (presumably less-hawkish) military leaders.

Finally this week, the trial of Jose Padilla opened, five years after the alleged terrorist was arrested and accused of hatching a plot to plant a “dirty bomb” on US soil. For three of those years, Padilla had been held in solitary confinement with no access to legal representation, in violation of US and international law. The actual charges against Padilla contain no mention of a dirty bomb.

And throughout the week, thousands of US troops swarmed through neighborhoods in a place called “the triangle of death,” engaged in an aggressive house-to-house search for three kidnapped American soldiers. The effort is of course understandable—these men can’t be abandoned—and yet it is no doubt feeding the resentment of Iraqi civilians whose homes are being invaded. Resolution of this war seems more remote than ever.

Watching as these stories unfold, we can do little more than shrug. It’s just more bad news. So we grow more and more insensitive. Our outrage fades as the outrageous becomes more commonplace. Confronted by too many opportunities to experience pain and sorrow, our emotions simply turn off.