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War is peace. Now we know.
It's only going to get worse.
The Metaphysical Club
U.N. diplomats give Bush a blank check.
Next Stop, Southeast Asia?
The United States may have a new target.
Nation building vs. globalization.
Anthrax is bad, but smallpox is worse — much worse.
At the Gates of Power.
I cannot find the glory in this day.
Patriots and scoundrels.
Appall-o-Meter
Israel's Labor Party is silenced as violence erupts.
Bush administration hawks want to deploy "mini-nukes" against Osama bin Laden.
Under cover of war, the Bush administration pushes for fast track.
Freddy Falls
Green takes the runoff amid charges of race-baiting and miscounted votes.
Crude Justice
Ecuadorian Indians fight Texaco with U.S. tort law.
Punitive Measures
Suffering in solitary confinement.
ART: William Kentridge's animated politics.
Gun Crazy
BOOKS: The story of Arming America.
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October 26, 2001
War On The Weak
I cannot find the glory in this day.
The small plastic boxes of food we dropped also are a travesty. Many of these
are untouched, of course—Afghans have spent their lives learning terror
of anything hurled at them from the sky. Meanwhile, the genuine food aid on
which so many depended for survival has been halted by the war. We’ve killed
those who were too poor or crippled to flee, plus four humanitarian aid workers
who coordinated the removal of land mines from the beleaguered Afghan soil.
That office is now rubble, and so is my heart. I am going to keep pleading against this madness. I’ll get scolded for
it, I know. I’ve already been called every name in the Rush Limbaugh handbook:
traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I’m told I am dangerous
because I might get in the way of this holy project we’ve undertaken to
keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we’ve wiped out every last
person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for my immortal soul, and some have offered to buy
me a one-way ticket out of the country to anywhere. I accept these gifts with
a gratitude equal in measure to the spirit of generosity in which they were
offered. People threaten vaguely, “She wouldn’t feel this way if her
child had died in the war!” (I feel this way precisely because I can imagine
that horror.) More subtle adversaries simply say I am ridiculous, a dreamer
who takes a child’s view of the world, imagining it can be made better
than it is. The more sophisticated approach, they suggest, is to accept that
we are all on a jolly road trip down the maw of catastrophe, so shut up and
drive. I fight that, I fight it as if I’m drowning. When I get to feeling I am
an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculous little flag of
hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plain English that the
last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote
count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling us we will win this
war and not be “misunderestimated.” We aren’t standing apart
from the crowd, we are the crowd. There are millions of us, surely, who know
how to look life in the eye, however awful things get, and still try to love
it back. It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could be the kindest nation
on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture and see that many nations
with fewer resources than ours have found solutions to problems that seem to
baffle us. I’d like an end to corporate welfare so we could put that money
into ending homelessness. I would like a humane health-care system organized
along the lines of Canada’s. I’d like the efficient public-transit
system of Paris in my city, thank you. I’d like us to consume energy at
the modest level that Europeans do, and then go them one better. I’d like
a government that subsidizes renewable energy sources instead of forcefully
patrolling the globe to protect oil gluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil
gluttony is what got us into this holy war, and it’s a deep tar pit. I
would like us to sign the Kyoto agreement today and to reduce our fossil-fuel
emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, sensibly reorganized
lives. If this were the face we showed the world, and the model we helped bring
about elsewhere, I expect we could get along with a military budget the size
of Iceland’s. How can I take anything but a child’s view of a war in which men are acting
like children? What they’re serving is not justice, it’s simply vengeance.
Adults bring about justice using the laws of common agreement. Uncivilized criminals
are still held accountable through civilized institutions; we abolished stoning
long ago. The World Court and the entire Muslim world stand ready to judge Osama
bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a few billion dollars into
food, health care and education instead of bombs, you can bet we’d win
over enough friends to find out where he’s hiding. And I’d like to point out, since no one else has, that the Taliban is
an alleged accessory, not the perpetrator—a legal point quickly cast aside
in the rush to find a sovereign target to bomb. The word “intelligence”
keeps cropping up, but I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the
little boys are all screaming at each other, “He started it!” and
throwing rocks that keep taking out another eye, another tooth. I keep looking
around for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, “Boys! Boys!
Who started it cannot possibly be the issue here. People are getting hurt.” I am somebody’s mother, so I will say that now: The issue is people are
getting hurt. We need to take a moment’s time out to review the monstrous
waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don’t win
this one, guys. When there are people on earth willing to give up their lives
in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it’s clear that
we can’t out-technologize them. You can’t beat cancer by killing every
cell in the body—or you could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This
is a war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It
will only end when we have the guts to say it really doesn’t matter who
started it, and begin to try to understand, then alter, the forces that generate
hatred. We have always been at war, though the citizens of the United States were mostly
insulated from what that really felt like until September 11. Then, suddenly,
we began to say, “The world has changed. This is something new.” If
there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative
to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from
above, then, please, in the name of Heaven, I would like to see it. I would
like to see it now. Barbara Kingsolver is the author of, among other books, The Poisonwood
Bible and Prodigal Summer. This article will appear in a forthcoming
collection of essays. |
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In These Times is committed to remaining fiercely independent, but we need your help. Donate now to make sure we can continue providing the original reporting, deep investigation, and strategic analysis needed in this moment. We're proud to be in this together.
When
I picked up the newspaper and saw “America Strikes Back!” blazed boastfully
across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall—shouldn’t they reserve
at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war?—my heart sank.
We’ve answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the most
war-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out.