This is one of those articles I'm going to get mail about... but oh well. Sarajevo was a

tidy little peaceful city tucked in a verdant valley in the Balkans, an ideal topography to hold the 1984 winter Olympics. Then there was a war.

The Serbs took to the high ground and set siege. Over the course of a few years they dropped some four million shells on their defenseless victims. I saw twenty story buildings demolished by big shells, schools riddled to Swiss cheese by high caliber machine guns. I saw little craters in the sidewalk caused by what they called grenades: bombettes shot out of a mortar cannon.

There was an eerie beauty to the symmetrical rosettes about four feet across surrounded by a ring of smaller indentations created by the exploding shrapnel. I was told the bombing began each evening after dinner.

The Serbian soldiers could be heard singing as they loaded their bellies with Slivovitz and their cannons with ammunition. Once the attack began, people in the streets looked to the sky and if the smoke and fire were not landing in your neighbourhood, you continued your walk.

If you were reading the paper in your apartment and a grenade landed on your building, it might knock out your plumbing, in which case you turned the page.

Or it might kill you, in which case you didn't. After the millionth shell, what was the difference?

My point is that when we're exposed to something over and over again, even the threat of death, it loses meaning.

Now the airwaves are choked with talk of whether or not to lower the federal flags to half mast for every soldier killed. I'm hearing people say it would keep the message of the Afghan war in the forefront of our awareness. I don't think it would.

I hear people say lowering the flag is a sign of honouring, but that's not the way human

nature works.

Now, when I walk past a post office and see the flag at half mast I ask someone why. But would I ask if it was a frequent occurrence? It makes sense to me for a local community to honour its dead soldiers because it doesn't happen that often in one's own neighbourhood, but lowering the federal flags for every death in battle would become meaningless.

Shel Silverstein wrote a song called, "After You Been Having Steak for a Long Time Beans, Beans Taste Fine." I never bothered to learn it because the title says it all.