five years ago

In the spring of 1989, I was seven years old. My parents had a scratchy blue couch, and I was sitting on it. I was wearing a tee shirt that used to be my older sister's; it was covered in puffy painted seashells and covered my knees. I should've been in bed, I think, but I was watching the news instead. People were in streets yelling and carrying signs and running. There were people with guns and angry faces. Everything looked jumpy and strange. One of the cameramen dropped a camera and someone else picked it up and kept filming. I was afraid and got up to stand, half-hidden, behind the couch. I put my cheek against the rough upholstery and kept watching.

I was seven years old. I knew about wars. I had been to a Civil War battlefield and felt the buzzy boom of cannons in the bones of my chest. I knew my ancestors had fought in the American Revolution. I thought wars were fought for good reasons and to keep people safe. I never knew that governments did bad things, that they could send soldiers to shoot at teenagers for running through the streets carrying signs. I thought governments were like my parents: benevolent makers of sometimes mystifying rules. Watching the tanks roll into Tianamen Square was this terrifying moment in which I realized the world wasn't the mostly-good place I'd always believed it to be.

In the spring of 2003, I was twenty one. My parents had a beige, over-stuffed couch then, and I was perching on its arm. I was wearing my teeshirt with the firetrucks on it and watching the invasion of Iraq with a sick feeling in my stomach. I kept thinking about that day years earlier and kept thinking, over and over, you can not sign my name to this fucking bad idea; you can not sign my name to this.

I love America. I do. With the same kind of love you might have for your chainsmoking anti-Semitic grandparents: I know its flaws and faults, but somehow it's a relationship that goes deeper than those things. I think about the way gray highways stretch out toward the horizon and about my great-great-grandmother cursing and spitting at yankee soldiers. I think about corn dogs and tap dancing chorus lines and the Bill of Rights. I think about blues and rock and roll and Richard Avedon's In the American West. I think about Zion National Park, Mother Jones, and the maple trees I grew up climbing, and I find myself in the arms of a fierce and unexpected devotion.

Five years ago, Senator Robert Byrd stood in front of Congress and delivered a speech* that said many of the things I'm trying to articulate today:

I believe in this beautiful country. I have studied its roots and gloried in the wisdom of its magnificent Constitution. I have marveled at the wisdom of its founders and framers. Generation after generation of Americans has understood the lofty ideals that underlie our great Republic. I have been inspired by the story of their sacrifice and their strength.
But, today I weep for my country. I have watched the events of recent months with a heavy, heavy heart. No more is the image of America one of strong, yet benevolent peacekeeper. The image of America has changed. Around the globe, our friends mistrust us, our word is disputed, our intentions are questioned.

Instead of reasoning with those with whom we disagree, we demand obedience or threaten recrimination. Instead of isolating Saddam Hussein, we seem to have isolated ourselves. We proclaim a new doctrine of preemption which is understood by few and feared by many. We say that the United States has the right to turn its firepower on any corner of the globe which might be suspect in the war on terrorism. We assert that right without the sanction of any international body. As a result, the world has become a much more dangerous place.
We flaunt our superpower status with arrogance. We treat U.N. Security Council members like ingrates who offend our princely dignity by lifting their heads from the carpet. Valuable alliances are split. After war has ended, the United States will have to rebuild much more than the country of Iraq. We will have to rebuild America's image around the globe.

The case this Administration tries to make to justify its fixation with war is tainted by charges of falsified documents and circumstantial evidence. We cannot convince the world of the necessity of this war for one simple reason. This is a war of choice.

There is no credible information to connect Saddam Hussein to 9/11. The twin towers fell because a world-wide terrorist group, al-Qaida, with cells in over 60 nations, struck at our wealth and our influence by turning our own planes into missiles, one of which would likely have slammed into the dome of this beautiful Capitol except for the brave sacrifice of the passengers on board.

The brutality seen on September 11th and in other terrorist attacks we have witnessed around the globe are the violent and desperate efforts by extremists to stop the daily encroachment of western values upon their cultures. That is what we fight. It is a force not confined to borders. It is a shadowy entity with many faces, many names, and many addresses.

But, this Administration has directed all of the anger, fear, and grief which emerged from the ashes of the twin towers and the twisted metal of the Pentagon towards a tangible villain, one we can see and hate and attack. And villain he is. But, he is the wrong villain. And this is the wrong war. If we attack Saddam Hussein, we will probably drive him from power. But, the zeal of our friends to assist our global war on terrorism may have already taken flight.

The general unease surrounding this war is not just due to "orange alert." There is a pervasive sense of rush and risk and too many questions unanswered. How long will we be in Iraq? What will be the cost? What is the ultimate mission? How great is the danger at home? A pall has fallen over the Senate Chamber. We avoid our solemn duty to debate the one topic on the minds of all Americans, even while scores of thousands of our sons and daughters faithfully do their duty in Iraq.

What is happening to this country? When did we become a nation which ignores and berates our friends? When did we decide to risk undermining international order by adopting a radical and doctrinaire approach to using our awesome military might? How can we abandon diplomatic efforts when the turmoil in the world cries out for diplomacy?

Why can this President not seem to see that America's true power lies not in its will to intimidate, but in its ability to inspire?

War appears inevitable. But, I continue to hope that the cloud will lift. Perhaps Saddam will yet turn tail and run. Perhaps reason will somehow still prevail. I along with millions of Americans will pray for the safety of our troops, for the innocent civilians in Iraq, and for the security of our homeland. May God continue to bless the United States of America in the troubled days ahead, and may we somehow recapture the vision which for the present eludes us.

A few hours after these words were said, the war began. And it continues, with no clear objectives and no clear successes, gleeful presidential proclamations not withstanding. It continues with around four thousand Americans dead and thirty thousand wounded. It continues with more than 80,000 Iraqis dead from violence. It continues as mortality rates continue to climb. It continues as violence escalates in recent days. I cannot sign my name to this tragedy. I will not sign my name to this.

I skipped my Wednesday night class to go to a peace rally. I held a candle close to my chest and stood in a circle that contained more WW II veterans than twenty-somethings. We were silent for a long moment, and I tried to pray. I found myself near tears and unable to formulate my thoughts into a petition.

I cannot escape the conviction, that something's gone horribly, horribly wrong here. And that we've watched this travesty with a sinister breed of passivity from our over-stuffed beige couches. The days after September 11, 2001 were frightening ones. They were. But we've allowed our elected officials to parlay that fear into appalling infringements of human rights of US citizens and of foreign nationals, to parlay that fear into the largely unprovoked invasion of a sovereign nation, to parlay that fear into the widespread acceptance of ill-conceived, over-blown rhetoric that, at best, could be said to obscure rather than enlighten or inform.

I don't suffer from the misguided notion that the people of the US are ethically or spiritually superior to the people of other nations. But I did, with a childish feeling of familial allegiance, somehow think we could do better than this.

And it's more than time we did. Five years is five years too many. It's time to stop watching the war in Iraq recapped only on the Daily Show during Family Guy's commercials, to stop flipping past another story about a carbomb in search of the comics or updates on our basketball brackets, to stop pretending that none of this is happening. It's time to stop pretending: that girl from your high school debate team drives a Hummer in Iraq; that boy you met (and may've kissed, just a little, after your third gin and tonic) at that party is awaiting orders to ship out; your best friend's exboyfriend's old roommate is finishing up his second tour of duty. It's time to stop pretending: that screaming woman in that documentary you saw looks a little like your aunt without her makeup, and for all intents and purposes, she could be. Incidents of culture or geography do not compromise mutual humanity, and it's impossible to ignore the persistent and seemingly inexorable toll this conflict continues to wreak on Iraq's civilian population. As a nation, we've worked long and hard to ignore these facts and these faces--the grinning faces of the boys we knew from high school and the bloodied faces of families out for groceries when the lady next to them in line exploded in a hail of shrapnel. There's been five years of this. Five years.

Five years means that it is, in a manner of speaking, time to get off our collective couches and take to the streets with signs in our hands. Five years means it time we no longer let our government sign our names to this war. Five years is five years too many.

______________________________________________________________________

Read up:

• http://www.amnestyusa.org/
• http://thomas.loc.gov/home/multicongress/multicongress.html
• http://www.fas.org/man/docs/qdr/
• http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/
• http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10907.htm

Speak up:

• https://forms.house.gov/wyr/welcome.shtml
• http://www.congress.org/congressorg/directory/congdir.tt
• http://www.onebigtorrent.org/

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*reprinted from salon.com

**big thanks to Josh White, who provided most of these links.

One Day Late

This morning I filled in for a friend who teaches a fourth grade Sunday school class. The whole experience is surreal. I don't let the kids call me Ms O---, although maybe they're supposed to. Titles make me feel weird. Kids always change Ms to Miss or, worse, Mrs. Mrs. O-- is, after all, my mother. She's very much a "Mrs. O--," the sort of schoolteacher that populates 1950s sit-coms. Vintage wardrobe notwithstanding, I am not. Plus, I hate the gender politics intertwined with name calling.

Once I had an upsetting dream about teaching in which my students were rebelling against my desire not to communicate marital status in my title. I was married in the dream and had cagily combined my last name with that of my spouse--without that dreadful hyphenation--and was using "Ms." If you're not bitter and single, they were shouting, why do you insist on "Ms?" They were all wearing berets and Colonel Sanders string ties. I have the strangest dreams sometimes.
No one much has ever asked me to work with kids in church. Or kids at all. I think I've babysat three times in my life. I may say "fuck" too much, but I haven't always said fuck this much, so that's probably not the whole reason. I don't come off as much of a nurturer maybe. But my friend asked me to cover his classes, so I did. I'm happy to do it, commitment to getting my ass out of bed on a Sunday morning notwithstanding. I like kids, believe it or not. Someone once told me that I talk to kids like I talk to other people, and I hope that's true. I remember liking to be addressed like an adult. In fact, I still enjoy it, so if you were considering calling me "honey," I'd really advise against it.

That's why I'm suspicious of Sunday School curriculum. I always hated Sunday School as a kid. I loved my teachers, but for the most part I just wasn't up for that flannel board shit or any of the saccharine language people teach small girls wearing lacy white socks.

When I was very young I called history, the past "back in horse and buggy days when Jesus and Indians were alive." I realized that these times were not concurrent, but I was trying to express some idea about the past I imagined, a sense of romance and of mystery and of longing for the things that somehow were lost to me before I was born. One Sunday my little sister piously reminded me that Jesus is alive--in our hearts. I wanted to punch in those tiny white teeth of hers. I know that.

Every Sunday morning we'd gather and sing while an old woman in a white-collared dress played an upright piano: Father Abraham had many sons. I am one of them, and so are you, so let's just praise the Lord. I may never march in the infantry, ride in the calvary, shoot the artillery. I may never soar o'er the enemy, but I'm in the Lord's Army! I'm inright outright upright downright happy all the time since Jesus Christ came in and cleansed my heart from sin, I'm inrightoutrightuprightdownright happy all the time!

All the pictures in the picture Bible were of kind faced people dressed for a production of Godspell. The pages were fingered and smudged by the children who'd sat in our small wooden chairs two decades before. Joshua and Moses and Sampson and Elisha and, even those pretty girls Esther and Ruth taught us little lessons about being kind to our brother and sisters and obeying our moms and dads and being a friend to the kids no one else would play with. The Littlelordjesusnocryinghemakes laid in that piled up hay and smiled out at me. His eyes were black as beads in his pink face. My tights were snagged and my hair was tousled. I crayoned "God is Love" in fat blue letters and signed my name below.

The other day I was listening to a mix tape or, rather, a mix cd someone made me. The next to the last song was a song called "One Day Late" sung by a woman who calls herself Sam Phillips. She started her career under a different name and on a Christian label, but her music quickly came into conflict with the ethos of her employers. She's something less than cheerful. Or something more, I suppose.

Help is coming one day late...

After you've given up and all seems gone,

help is coming one day late...

He'll be late.

You try to understand.

You try to fix your broken hands,

but remember there always has been good,

like stars you don't see in the day sky.

Wait for night.

Help is coming one day late--one day late.

I'm waiting for my bus and squinting under the sun and listening to this, wishing someone had played this for me while I was in womb. Someday, I told myself, I will play this in the nursery for my children. Then I laughed a little bit at myself: this is why you don't have children--you'd depress the hell out of them before they're old enough to walk. Toddlers dressed in black and full of ennui and Paxil.

I wonder if the people who write songs and stories and, dare I say, Sunday School curriculum remember being children. I do. I didn't enjoy it. My childhood wasn't particularly Oliver Twisty. My family loved me, and I had toys and friends and books and trees. But I remember being disappointed a thousand times. I remember wanting to strike my small fists against the things I didn't understand, the things that seemed so unfair about life. And there were so many of those things. I tried to be good and I was bad instead. I wanted to be a princess and a ballerina and a writer and an artist, but I had too many tangles in my hair and snot dried on my lip. My knees were scabby and my ankles were scratched. I had my picture taken with Santa one year and had to wear an ugly brown sweatshirt that had once belonged to a boy. In the picture my pink mouth is stuck out and my eyes are wet.

There were marvelous things about my childhood: dressing up in old window sheers and the wide green leaves of spring and space between the refrigerator and the wall and the way my dad tossed me in the air and caught me under my armpits.

But I was never in-right, out-right, up-right, down-right happy all the time. Jesus didn't seem like he lived in my heart. He was on my shoulder, as persistant and sharp as an elbow, reminding me not to scratch bad words in the dirt under the swingset or plot to fill my sister's perfume bottles with wild onions or make my mother ask me nineteen times to come inside and unload the dishwasher.

I wish someone had played me a song then about help being far away, about feeling alone, about things only getting worse. I think I would've believed them.

In the mornings before Sunday School, the fourth graders and gather with the rest of the upper elementary classes to sing. There's no old woman and no upright piano. A middle-aged guy in a bolo tie plays the recorder, actually, and lets the kids pass around a tambourine. The kids can call out choices from a little bound book of songs, and they always want to sing spirituals or old hymns. At first I was surprised: this is a Bible church, the sort of place where people sing "Lord I Lift Your Name on High" or that dreadful song about walking around in a garden with Jesus. But I quickly realized it all makes perfect sense. Prone to wander, God I feel it, prone to leave the Lord I love. They sing in high voices. Someone of them don't yet realize they're far off key. In two or three years they'll duck their heads and mumble the words. Maybe these are the last months they'll sing so clearly or so unashamedly. There is a fountain filled with blood. The boys have their shirts hanging untucked in the back. The girls seem be glittering, as if the latest playground fashion is club kid circa 1995. What can take away my sin? They look serious, or at least the ones not kicking one another under the table do. The sins of children seem small, somehow, like we wish our own were.

Back in the classroom we sit at plastic tables and read about Joshua and Moses in order to learn about paying attention in Sunday School. I sit there and wonder what dumbass thought this was the point of the story. People are dying here, and I'm supposed to pass out the stickers next. They have cartoon of little altars on them. Moses is up on a hill, watching. Joshua is in a valley fighting the Amalekites with his bloodied fists and his ragged breaths. Moses is holding up his arms to the sky. His arms get tired. The kids in the class want to try it out, so I tell them to go ahead. Their arms get tired too.

I want to warn them that that's the least of their problems. I want to tell them about sin and doubt and failure and about having weird dreams about the ramifications of romantic love for their post-feminist worldviews. I want to warn them that someday they'll end up fighting somewhere in some red fury even though they thought all along they were too kind and too peaceful for that. I want to warn them that someday they'll hold up their arms to a sky that seems as empty as a bell and their arms will get tired and their feet will get tired and their hearts will get tired. But I think they already know all this. I think they've lived enough on the playgrounds and in the hallways and around the dinner tables of their worlds to have some idea.
I want to tell them help is coming. One day late. It's almost time to go, though, so I tell them it's time from prayer. I tell them they have to settle the heck down--I'm not thinking the word heck, but it's what I say--and close their eyes and their mouths and fold their sweaty little boy hands together to think about God. I pray that God will make us a little bit better people this week and that God will bless the people we love and the people we don't love. It's time to go, so I fold up the book and we go.

fall 2006