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Benazir Bhutto

This week's assassination of Benazir Bhutto is having a far more profound effect on me than I would have expected.It is deeply unsettling in a global sense, of course. And it resurrects those never-too-distant memories of the American assassinations (Kennedy- King-Kennedy) that occurred during my political awakening and coming-of-age. But there's something more, something about a privileged, educated, barrier-breaking, history-making woman walking consciously, knowingly into martyrdom. What a waste. A striking, beautiful woman made more intimately real to me when I read she was known as "Pinkie" among family and friends because of her rosy complexion; a mother, a daughter, a sister. I could relate -- until all these relationships were trumped, it seems, by the fact that she was also, most importantly, a political being. Bhutto was born into a sphere of influence, experienced her father's execution, and her own exiles, house arrests, and solitary confinement, and knew both successes and failures at the polls. She also knew - she had to - the personal risk inherent in her return to Pakistan. Any illusion of safety was surely destroyed by the bombs that killed 150 of her people during that first motorcade this fall.

So what was it in this outstanding woman's heart and/or mind that she felt defined her destiny? What was it she believed worth dying for? Could it have been the crowd's adulation alone that, as one photographer at the scene suggests, compelled her to rise up from her armored car to give assassins their white-scarved target? If so, the act seems a mere mis-step, a fatal mis-step to be sure, but not the key to her fate. What was the key? That's what I'm grappling with. What compelled her to be where she was, doing what she was doing, in the face of such hate-filled, lethal unrest? Is there a corollary in her role and that of other political leaders in today's world? Is there a corollary in her choices and any woman's? Does Bhutto's assassination mean someone like my friend and classmate Hillary Clinton is at comparable risk? This troubles me.

What is worth dying for? Besides my kids, I can't think of a single thing. Perhaps that's what troubles me most of all.