Certainties

Posted on May 5, 2004 in Attitudes Crosstalk

This only looks like it is about politics.

Over at alembic I saw it first. Burningbird speaks as if she was onto something new and never before charted:

Each weblog we visit, the owner–myself included–pontificates on all the wrongs and evils of the day. Expressing opinions is a good thing, but lately it seems that even the most thoughtful weblog writers are screaming their words out, pages covered with the spit of their emotional outbursts, saturated with surety.

Who is this “we”?

Over at alembic, I wrote this:

This has always been the case. Beliefs don’t come tumbling down. They erode imperceptibly. When we glance at any life, we see a fixity. And where has this cocksureness come from? From a desire to feel a place, to run one’s fingers around the rock, I suspect.

Is it a sin? I don’t know. But to mark it as one strikes me like a complaint about the fact that the tide comes in or the house finches chirp when they see the first light. The song of the house finches never changes that I can hear: does that give me grounds for thinking myself better?

Sometimes, it just feels good to be a gushing stream. Sometimes it feels good to blurt something out, not caring that in a few years, one’s mind could change. It’s like the house finches singing. Words words words.

I take a breath and look at the morning. Those birds and me, we’re both life.

Further thoughts come to me. A year ago, I was against this war. People yelled at me because I was being “unrealistic” and “uncompromising”. Yeah, I was sure of myself. Before the war, I spoke out against it and chided others for their wishy-washiness. During the war, I refused to end my criticism, to perform any act which might be taken as a gesture of support. After the war, I continued to criticize, though at a lesser rate because, quite frankly, I was tired of using my head to test the hardness of that wall.

Before the war, people said “I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t like it but I don’t know.” During the war, people said “We’ve got to support our boys. We’ve got to support our boys no matter what.” I pointed out that our boys were men who made choices. They still are as Kathryn Cramer points out: A few of them chose not to participate in the acts of torture which have come to our attention.

Now, after the war, I’ve been called an “Ugly American” (predicated on a misunderstanding) and people say “Why aren’t you speaking up about this? Can’t you see what is happening?”

Yes, I can see what is happening. I can also look back at myself and note that while I have made some changes — mostly in my attitude about how to take the inevitable stupidities of self-proclaimed experts on war who have never been on a battleground or as an unarmed civilian in a neighborhood being shelled — I have remained a pacifist, opposed to this war.

I just ask you this: is it better to remain steadfast in this certainty predicated on my reading, my thinking, and first-hand experience of war or to oscillate between lukewarm pacifism and jingoism? When we arrive at a good place, should we worry about all the other choices out there or should we spend the time examining the implications of where we stand very closely?

I arrived at where I am by standing still and taking a cold hard look at what I believed. Over in Marie’s comments, Shelley gloats over a comment someone else made: “Day by day I question my own beliefs and they come up valid.”

Some of this has to do with comfort. For some people. It’s never comfortable to be a pacifist, despite what the war-cryers say. You see bombs hit houses, reduce mosques and churches to rubble. The people cry “We must counterattack.” And you sigh. You sigh because you understand the rage and because you know the futility of throwing bodies against grenades, bullets, and cruise missiles. Everyone thinks that you are the enemy. It’s no easy life being a pacifist and my cynicism is what led to my being labeled an “Ugly American”.

I am, nonetheless, changing. It’s an attitude thing. I look at rants like that of Shelley and think “Well, today I’m not going to be drawn into that.” I have my certainties that work for now. Over the years, I’ve seen my views change, but despite the anti-depressants and despite my living now in affluent Orange County, I have not changed them in any fundamental way in the last twenty years. I went from someone who believed in Might for Right to Pacifism. In my late teens, I might have been drawn in by the Bush rhetoric, by all the yellow ribbons and the white knights of this Crusade against a forever shifting target. But it took ambivalence to be that way. I don’t think I want to return to that kind of open-mindedness.

Every moment I live is for now. I’m certain that I’m sitting at my desk until I stand up or until it vanishes underneath me.