Politics & Power Quote by Rosanne Cash

Exhaustion is the engine of Rosanne Cash's sentence, and she doesn't dress it up. The repetition of "another" is doing the heavy lifting: not just another attack, but another headline, another cycle of attention and numbness. It's a protest against the way war becomes content, a grim genre you scroll past. By foregrounding "reading", she frames the violence as mediated experience, something filtered through newspapers and screens until it threatens to feel abstract. Her sickness is moral and sensory: too much death, too routinely packaged.

The escalating numbers (10, 20, 30, 70, 100) mimic the grotesque arithmetic of conflict reporting. They're not precise because precision isn't the point; the point is how quickly the mind learns to treat body counts like weather. That climb also indicts the audience's threshold: if 10 doesn't shock, maybe 70 will; if 70 doesn't, what will? Cash is asking why it takes escalation to reclaim attention.

"Both Americans and Iraqis" is a small but pointed refusal of the era's narrative sorting. In the mid-2000s Iraq War context, American deaths were often individualized while Iraqi deaths were massed into anonymous totals. Cash yokes them together, insisting that grief can't be partitioned by nationality without doing violence twice: once to the bodies, again to the meaning of their loss. Coming from a musician, not a policy official, it reads as civic conscience in plain language: a public figure using the simplest words to resist the normalization of catastrophe.