Of Time and the River

Posted on March 6, 2003 in Peace

These are times when it feels best to keep one’s circuit restricted, to remain close to home, and dream of places where wide waters flow quietly by, of river banks covered with trees in the green of summer.

The last time I experienced such a place, I was in Serbia, on the banks of the Danube. A few days later, I went to Vukovar, Croatia, the scene of a massacre and a town levelling, using equipment copied from U.S. technology. (photos)

Vukovar also lay next to the Danube. I remember having a coke in a little cafe, talking to a former Hungarian communist leader who was shocked, utterly shocked, with how a vision of a pan-Slavic republic had been so callously destroyed by wicked men who cunningly recited the lie that says that sectional interests override broader, pan-human ones. I stared out to the blue waters, over to Vojvoldina, a Serbian/Hungarian border province adminstered by Yugoslavia. Green trees lined the opposite bank: there were few on this other side because they’d literally been mowed down by the intense hail of bullets.

What crops will American troops harvest by this means along the Tigris and Euphrates, I wonder? What burnt offerings will drift over the Persian Gulf. The lives of the people will be a living hell for a short time and then, via one outcome or another, they will return to minding their lives by the rivers as their ancestors had for centuries.

What I want to do in these troubled times is float. I do too little of that in good times and even less in times like these.

Note: A “Mini Magazin” is roughly equivalent to a 7-11 or other convenience store.

---

Vukovar still invades my dreams. I don’t think that anyone who saw Vukovar in those months could turn anyone unmoved. Here I saw a town busted up for the purpose of appeasing a matching set of madmen and their cabals in the respective national capitals.

It’s the people who dismiss Vukovar as “not much”, who think it a light thing to bomb and to invade a country so that one madman with an undocumented few weapons of mass destruction might be crushed for the glory of another who has many at his command.

Vukovar made me sick of the designs of political men. People on the periphery of the warring nations often pointed to all the national capitals and the zealots who ran them. I was often told that the same kind of people ran both places. Whether it was Tudjman or Milosevic, the people of the borders felt, the same manical impulses and egomania governed their visions.

What Milosevic and Tudjman had in common, they said, was a desire to destroy any place where people got along regardless of ethnicity and religious background. They meant places like Sarajevo and Osijek. I think now of the ridicule some heap on Los Angeles and San Francisco in this light and it terrifies me.

The people who rave against all Muslims rave against some of my neighbors when they cast their nets. And if they are allowed to act against them, they will do so in my neighborhood.

I don’t want that here.