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March 19, 2003
This morning I took a walk through my neighborhood, through the serpentine streets carved into the hill, past the apartments and houses that abrade the landscape, and I tried to wrap my mind around the fact that we would be going to war in less than 12 hours. Twelve years ago I, with all the myopia of a teenager, believed in the eternal goodness of America, sang the anthem with my heart in my throat, and pictured gallant young men freeing Kuwait. How times have changed, and how, in these brief moments of contemplation before my days begin, I sometimes wish for the sureness to return, wish I could lose my sense of reason, the knowledge of all the books I've read. How easy it would be to believe again that we are right, that there are such black and white definitions in international politics.
But I can't. And no one else can, either, regardless of their attempts to.
I walked past my neighbor this morning and she smiled at me. She was putting up little American flags in her lawn, cheap things, garish and ugly to look at them closely, a poor imitation of the real thing. She smiled at me, greeted me warmly. She's older, kindly and we talked for a moment as she stabbed the grass in her yard with token flags. There were men in front of her house and as we chatted I noticed them pulling something large across her front yard. "The new hot tub," she said, motioning with the gilt end of one flag. And then she yelled out to the men, "For God's sakes, don't screw up the lawn!" Then she turned back to me and smiled, forked more flags into the yard.
I wanted to shake her, wanted her to understand that doll flags and new hot tubs do not a patriot make, but I'm afraid, quite honestly, that in America they may. Thousands of civilians are about to be killed, the US is poised to break international law, and still, it's hot tubs and new shoes and a Krispy Kreme in the morning with your coffee. It's business as usual. It's the courage of being out of range.
And it's not just the breadth of our ignorance, but the blissfullness of it, the way we retire into it like spoilt children, which alarms me. How quick we've leapt to war with little or no questioning, we who have no memories of what it means to fight a war on our soil. We don't even have firelight tales of those battles from our grandfathers, our great grandfathers. We are so divorced from the complexity of war, the excruciating violence of it, the dirtiness of it. We've fought our wars in our armchairs and sofas via CNN and have bought into smart missiles and laser guided weaponary as a kind of morally blank check that allows us to write off guilt.
Last week in class I mentioned the 47,000 children that died as a result of the first Gulf War and another student shrugged. "It's the price of freedom," he said. There is a lot to argue there - whose freedom perhaps? - or if it was about freedom at all. But the most disturbing aspect was the way it was quantified, turned into a monetary metaphor, a cost equation. As though dead children could ever be quantified. Would 47,001 be too many? Would 46,000 have been a good deal? It's as though our alleged value of the individual is sacred only within our borders and never outside of them.
I know what we want, what it is we hope we'll find in the streets of Baghdad. It isn't oil, or terrorists, or even Saddam. We want our innocence back, we want to return to the time before the long day in September, before everything changed. We want to not cringe when we hear an airplane fly above us, not have to solemnly remove our shoes before every flight, not to worry for our children, or their children, with the realization that this, beyond all else, is completely outside of our abilities to thwart. And it's something war can never give us back.
But It's frightening, really, how easily we'll go into it, how we'll look over the morning paper each day of the war, read the tallies, and then pour cream into our coffe and set off in our well-heated cars for work. How easily we're led into false beliefs, how little most people know, how completely uninformed they are.
Are there wars worth fighting? Yes. But this isn't one of them.
Heather
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