Witness to the Effects of a Spiritual Fragmentation Grenade

Posted on September 8, 2002 in IRC/Chat Peace Reflections

This particular piece is not very good. I am posting it anyways because there are truths that I speak in it. Perhaps with more development I can express these feelings more clearly. For now, let’s just recognize that current events have tossed a grenade into my thoughts and I am feeling sliced and diced by the shrapnel.

Chat on #politics has been directed, almost exclusively, to the upcoming war in Iraq. No one doubts that it is going to happen. Bush wants it at all costs.

I see in myself an unhealthy anger brewing as I find myself getting more than a little personal in my comments about the greed and rancor of Americans nearly one year to the day following the September 11 catastrophe. This war comes to own me, heart and soul, whether I like it or not whenever I click the MIRC button.

One friend described the sentiment as “love Israel, hate Arabs”. You can just as readily make out a “love Arabs, hate Israel” rhetoric. I don’t want to be set against religions and those who bring it into the conversation are, I feel, trying to use my tolerance to shield their own intolerance.

Human rights has always been my first dedication when I talk politics. I read and sometimes act on the regular reports from all nations that I receive in my email box. This war discussion puts me in an uncomfortable position with regard to the situation in the Middle East: either I go against my pacifism and declare that war against these people is OK because they oppress women, make weapons, harbor terrorists, etc. OR I betray my dedication to social justice and equality by arguing against the existence of these things. I realize that I don’t need to make the awful choice that seems to be implied by those who want me so desperately for their position. A few weeks ago in IRC, I mentioned what I felt was the “light switch mentality” of political discussion. Applying it to the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians, both insist that their side of the box was “on”. I feel that neither is really on my side, what with their dedication, respectively, to repression and terrorism. There’s a switch I am asking to throw and either way I pull, I get darkness.

Some were laughing at Gandhi the other day. Few wanted to acknowledge that Gandhi moved the soul of an entire people to organize and oppose the British. And he did this by forcing the British to face not rebel guns but their own consciences.

Americans seldom will group together to take on something, unless they can do it in the comfort of their television room. They want 800 numbers for their charities and cruise missiles for their war. There’s no hands on involvement in either case.

I, too, have been avoiding commitment to principles. Here I sit at my computer, whining about the push button mentality of Americans, and all the while tapping at 101 keys to make my point heard in the living rooms of a very few. To tell the truth, I’m scared of the scimitar, of the possible loss of friends, that cuts when I take a stand. Still I must ask, friend and foe alike: I ask “How can anyone here not be angry about the way this nation strives to be the monster that it accuses Hussein of being?”

My point is (and I am glad that I have spent some time explaining this) not that we must be morally pure to war. To make such a suggestion is to tell those who want war that if they just find the right reason, I’ll go along with it. I care about Iraqi women enough that I want them freed from their harems, given the right to vote, and not killed by our bombs. (A dead person loses all rights, except maybe that to be buried or respectfully burned.) The human rights issues that I have championed over the years — all those letters I have written sometimes for prisoners of conscience and the words I have spoken for genuine freedom of hearts and minds — are being selectively employed to justify the ultimate human rights abuse, which is murder. Warmongering is not my kind of rights activism.

There’s another terrible cost I am being made to pay. Some friends, who
love my photography and my essays on nature seem to think that this is the only thing I should be doing. That I should ignore the aluminum tubes shrieking and just write about the scarlet heads of buckwheat blooms. They say that I shouldn’t give in to ridicule of what strikes me as absurd. That I should only speak of the sand hills surrounding my house, my fear of fires, the water gleaming on the beach, and make no mention of the twisted human fabric that hangs me like a lump of dripping cheese.

What comes out now is a whine and a whimper. “It’s not fair,” I say to myself. “It’s not fair that the things I value most of all are set against each other.” I am alive, dammit, and a person of many characteristics. This is all me, rant, rave, and thoughtful musings about beauty. Do not cleave me, my friends; do not ask that I surrender my diversity for a single-minded, terrible beauty.