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
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.