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I thought this was worth sharing, Helen
No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak
by Barbara Kingsolver
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.
October 14 2001 - Los Angeles Times
TUCSON -- I cannot find the glory in this day. 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.
The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that
these are untouched, of course--Afghanis 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 whoever was 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 have 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,
as many other nations have done before us. 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 reduce
our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous,
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, 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 and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.
We have always been at war, though the citizens of the U.S. were mostly insulated
from what that really felt like until Sept. 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.
No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak By BARBARA KINGSOLVER 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
October 14 2001 - Los Angeles Times
TUCSON -- I cannot find the glory in this day. 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.
The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that
these are untouched, of course--Afghanis 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 whoever was 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 have 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,
as many other nations have done before us. 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 reduce
our fossil-fuel emissions with legislation that will ease us into safer, less gluttonous,
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, 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 and understand, then alter the forces that generate hatred.
We have always been at war, though the citizens of the U.S. were mostly insulated
from what that really felt like until Sept. 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.
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