“I DO NOT BELIEVE IN WAR AT ALL,” SAYS THE PULITZER-PRIZE WINNING WRITER. “TO ME WAR IS SOMETHING TO BE OUTGROWN, IMMATURE, WASTEFUL AND SO DESTRUCTIVE TO LIFE THAT HUMAN BEINGS SHOULD SHUN IT AS THEY SHUN SWINE FLU OR HIV/AIDS OR BUBONIC PLAGUE.”
March 22, 2010
I do not believe in war at all; although I am as capable of anger as anyone. To me war is something to be outgrown, recognized as immature, wasteful and so destructive to life that human beings should shun it as they shun swine flu, or HIV/AIDS or as they once shunned Bubonic Plague. If our species survives, and it may well not, it will be because we learn not to fight to kill each other, though some of us may continue to fight as an expression of our not yet controllable nature.
It is painful to feel the war machine continuing in Iraq and Afghanistan and in all the other parts of the globe not covered by our media. It isn't that I thought one man, a new president, could stop it overnight or in one year--it has been acceptable behavior for millennia--but it was my hope that there would be, out of Washington, an entirely new and different approach to what is essentially the failure of human beings to listen to each other; to teach and guide and share with one another. To see the best, even in "the enemy." And where no "best" is discernable, to understand how what might have been good has become horribly twisted or destroyed. To think of small children who have no alternative, often, to growing up imprisoned in poisonous ideologies; there they stand in our missile sights, "terrorists" who never really had a chance.
Is there no way to reach our enemies other than by killing them? Do we "win" in this way? I cannot believe it. Rather I believe killing other human beings is not about winning, but about failure. Winning would be to begin to train our military to do what it also does wonderfully well: look after the inhabitants of the planet. It has been such a relief to see our soldiers stepping in to help earthquake victims in Haiti and elsewhere; to see their self-assurance and can-do spirit as they tackle the problems of crumbled buildings, trapped children, pain-crazed persons who, having lost homes and possessions, have nowhere to go. This is when I have felt most proud of our military. And it has been easy to see that this is where our soldiers have felt most proud of themselves.
There is much anger at our president from the community of pacifists and anti-war activists to which I belong. There is so much disappointment and rage. I share some of this; what I mostly feel, however, is not anger or rage, but grief. Eisenhower was right to warn us about the burgeoning power of the Military Industrial Complex, as he termed it. That it was quite capable of taking over the country, and the president with it. That we are in the hands of a war machine that doesn't really care who is elected to run the country; its aim is plunder, destruction, conquest and exploitation. Taking whatever its creators want by force. All in the name of "defense." Looking in our own families, we can see how we are connected to this machine: the jobs, the pensions, the chance to learn a trade or go to school. Many people fear that if the military stopped its machinations around the globe, millions of people would have no place, and no work.
And that is why what we must insist on, I believe, is transformation of the military. Though what use can be found for our obsolete missiles and weapons of mass destruction I cannot, myself, imagine. But my faith is that someone can imagine this; that we can make something useful out of things like old fighter planes and bomb casings. The way the earth is shaking so many of us out of bed in the middle of the night with no shelter left to our names, perhaps we should put our architects and builders to the task of designing and creating housing out of them. Humans are very clever, as we know. No more clever humans exist--along with some who are abysmally not clever--than in the United States.
TO BE CONTINUED…
Posted By: Richard Kigel
Sunday, March 28th 2010 at 9:27PM
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