To Expatriates and Citizens of Other Nations

Posted on May 11, 2004 in Courage & Activism Occupation of Iraq

It’s politics Tuesday.

This is an invitation. All of you expatriates and citizens of other lands, I ask that you listen. All of you Americans of wounded conscience, I ask that you write.

I’ve been struck by the bloggers in other lands who have been telling us Americans to write to our representatives, protest in the streets, blog against the war, and even start a revolution. I do not reject their anger about the war, but I want to interject the question they should be asking us, we who struggle against the war here in the United States, what they can do to help us in the cause.

When we talk to Palestinians we ask them “What can we do to help you?”

When we fought apartheid in South Africa, we asked “What can we do to help you?”

The expatriates and citizens of other lands sound sometimes like they blame all Americans for the antics of the marionette administration in Washington. They can be quick to press us into the image of a nation marching in lockstep. And they keep telling us what to do, what to do.

The first thing they say is “Feel Anger.” We’re already doing that. I understand the rage of Mike Golby and I share it. I, too, am frustrated by the Right who loves this war and the Middle which sloshes around like a nearly empty glass of compassion. So we unite on that.

Second, they tell us, protest. I’ve written the letters, made the phone calls that Yule inveighs us to make. I’ve called for these many times. Did she and others not notice what I and other American bloggers have said repeatedly?

It’s time for foreign bloggers to listen and pay attention to what they have to do to help us in our struggle against this utterly mad administration:

• Stop talking to us as if we were children and unable to see what is happening.
  
• Keep telling us what you see in your news because we don’t see it all here.
  
• Put pressure on your government to change its dealings with the United States. If there are U.S. bases in your country, call for their closure. Find out if your nation has contracts with Halliburton and urge businessmen and government officials to cancel them. Do the same for other American companies that support the Bush administration.
  
• Find out who in your country invests in the United States. The leaders include Britain, Canada, and the Netherlands. Divest in these companies if they won’t withdraw. Your money may be promoting our politics of fear.
  
• Urge International Monitoring of the fall elections.
  
• Turn CNN and Fox News off. Don’t watch them or any other American media conglomerate. Don’t buy products advertised on them.
  
• Help American organizations such as the ACLU financially if it is legal.
  
• Give moral support to American activists. Watch when you write that you acknowledge their existence.

These words are not said in anger. They are said from the place of exhaustion, where the body folds over once like a sweaty, oil-stained overall. You keep talking to us as if we’re criminals for not taking up arms against the most powerful government in the world, that we’re overdue for spontaneous combustion. We feel tired because not only are we hectored from within, we are hectored from without. It’s pathetic, for example, to watch IRC shouting matches between Europeans and leftist Americans over whether or not the American people as a whole deserve to be rendered into the dust of oblivion. This kind of wrestling is malproductive and it causes us Americans to collapse into indifference about just causes such as ending the war in Iraq.

If you care about the war in Iraq, start caring about the activists, the poets, and the free voices who strive to live joyfully despite the harshness of these times.