Peace Man

Posted on March 13, 2006 in Peace Silicon Valley

Croatian and Serbian soldiers were the grizzlies for this Timothy Treadwell. I think of the scene in Grizzly Man where Treadwell dances around hurling epithets at the National Park Service and overinflating his role in “protecting” the bears from poachers who never showed. I went because I thought I had had a leading to do so. I had never seen a war and I felt that I was obligated by my peace activism to do so. So, in other words, I became a peace tourist, a variety of person who whooshed into the country and out again, never really experiencing the real deprivation of war, in which your country comes under attack and is occupied by a foreign power.

It’s a bit like my not knowing what it is like to have been raped but thinking I can understand by being in the same room where a rape once occurred. It’s not quite as distant as, say, Civil War tourists who go to the old battlefields, pose next to a cannon, and think they can conceive of what it was like to stand in a horizontal cascade of minie ball fire splashing through the atmosphere. You don’t have the patriotism, you don’t have the fear for your loved ones. Like all born-in-the-USA-Americans, I have no idea what it means to live under occupation or have a foreign army crash into my country, slashing power lines, water pipes, sewer mains, and post office trucks as they arrive.

In my mania, I thought I could. I saw the vestiges, spent one night in a city where a single shell or house bomb exploded near me. Heard machine gun fire. Saw soldiers and a woman mangled by shrapnel. Saw the sunken eyes and the shaking shoulders. Had AK-47s pointed at my belly. And yet, I never grasped what it was all about.

Treadwell said that you had to be careful because they would eat you. I went into a country where I could have gotten shot, full of facts and fuller of theories when I left. But this savior could not save the peace movment because he could not understand the war as those who had sprouted from that soil did. I was a foreigner and damned lucky that I broke at home, before I could be stuffed and returned in a plastic bag.