Reader Tana comments on our post, Where’s Riverbend?
I am becoming increasingly concerned for Riverbend. I check her blog everyday, sometimes multiple times in a day, looking for reassurance that she is O.K. She is looked on by many as a friend and a living, breathing connection to what is really going on in Iraq. I have suspected for a while that she and her family might leave Iraq; I hope this is what happened and we will hear from her soon. God bless you Riverbend. You are in all of our prayers.
It’s now been seven weeks since Riverbend posted, by far her longest pause. This is what war does. Innocents and civilians have their lives disrupted and destroyed. Family members and friends are killed and maimed – all because a lunatic foreign power invaded their country based on lies with bloodlust for oil and dominance.
This is what war does.
It’s also, in a slightly altered way, what the Internet does. So many of us are “friends” that have never met. It doesn’t take a war. A blogger you read every day could suddenly stop posting and you would have no way of knowing what happened? Did they get bored with blogging? Lose their Internet connection? Die? You might never know.
[…] Some of the blog-specific talk out there in the past couple weeks has related to the well-known Iraqi blogger who went by the name of Riverbend. I discovered this recent “where’s Riverbend?” theme after I, too, remembered her blog today and wondered if she had written anything new. She had not. Her last post was three months ago, and began with the ominious line: “Residents of Baghdad are systematically being pushed out of the city.” It ended with these anxious remarks: I sometimes wonder if we’ll ever know just how many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis left the country this bleak summer. I wonder how many of them will actually return. Where will they go? What will they do with themselves? Is it time to follow? Is it time to wash our hands of the country and try to find a stable life somewhere else? […]