Hit and Run

I’m trying very hard not to fall into a deep depression. Likely the all too real calls from my own life – as in trying to land a job, cash flow problems, and other and sundry “domestic” issues that come to plague from time to time – add in to the general gloom.

Today I’m a bit on edge waiting on a yes or no from a job prospect. Still reasonably cheerful, I do find that reading the wires, the blogs, Drudgereport, BBC and CNN are getting to me.

It makes it a hit and run day. A hit and run on my heart. Boom, 50+ dead in an explosion from an errant missile that hit a busy Baghdad market. Bam, a plaintive picture of a woman carrying her young children out of Basra. Bang, I’m free of it all and walking about during my lunch hour under a pretty blue sky. Boom, I talk to my young one about her day at school. Ka-bam turns out the CIA wrote a paper in February warning of the likely use of paramilitary forces and guerilla tactics in any armed conflict with Iraq..

Somewhere I read a headline that says “the world is facing global destabilization.” I can only shout out, “dah,” as any righteous teenager would when faced with the facts!

WHAT WERE THESE IDIOTS THINKING! Ugh!

I’m trying to stay happy, trying to keep it all straight in my head to enjoy my rapidly approaching Friday evening with my family. I give myself permission even to do so. To take sustenance. To smooch with my husband. To watch something other than the latest on cable news. To have a glass of beer. To feel normal in an abnormal world.

I’m signing off to wash my face now. To keep myself in the center of a storm that will allow for what constitutes normal in my life to happen. And it’s not that the world can wait so much as there are things that just need to be left to themselves for a while.

Maybe all these blogs can make a difference at the end of it all. Even Gary Hart has a blog now. So may there’s hope. Maybe all of this talking and communicating on line will make all this other really bad stuff an anachronism of another time and place. Least ways that’s my hope.

Tonight, my little girl and I are going to light our candles. We’re going to send a message to the world hoping for peace.

The real shock and awe

What were the planners of the war and their masters thinking? That we could just roll in with guns blazing and folks would jump up and down with their little American Flags shouting hurray?

I mean really, let’s look at our “enemy” that baddest of the bad, Saddam, we are talking about a man who has stated clearly and concisely that everyday he stays alive is another day of victory. Did we really think he was going to go gently into that goodnight?

And as for shock and awe, the real shock and awe seems to be the realization that our little alpha male trick isn't working. That rather than acquiesce, folks are fighting for their own land – and view us not as liberators but as invaders. After all, this isn’t Grenada we’re talking about, and if we really look at what happened there, the liberation of medical students aside, what was there, really?

And what were the Bushies thinking? That’s what I don’t understand. Too wrapped up in their own rhetoric that the basic real simple stuff just slipped by? As in, invade a people and they get pissed off. They don’t roll over. When overwhelmed they’ll use every trick on their dashboard to thwart and disrupt.

The ever hopeful optimist in me would like to believe that horrors of real time war will, eventually provide the seeds for a global rejection of war as a means of resolving conflict. Though having said that, there is a piece in today’s New York Times on child soldiers in the Ivory Coast that just as readily inspires a profound sense that Iraq is more a symptom of our demise that an opportunity to make something good of it over the long term. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/27/international/africa/27IVOR.html

Military planners, spin doctors, cable station generals, and Bush propagandists aside – we are in for a long haul and a long fight. Its potential effect on American society is an unknown as are the immediate and longer term concerns on how a sustained war effort and its aftermath will effect our economy – not to mention such things as education, health care, social security and the entire notion of the government “contract” with its citizens for the protection of their life, liberty and pursuit of happiness.

Right now, shock and awe plays out whenever charred bodies and anguished faces are shown. So are the daily body counts. I remember it growing up as the second or third from the lead on the evening news. Body counts, pictures of napalm explosions, “embedded” reporters walking single file with the grunts through lush jungle, the daily war briefing, and a word or two about yet another self immolating Buddhist Priest.

It seems we have doomed ourselves to repeat our Viet Nam story. As sooner or later, life for us, the “unbombed” will begin to move in other directions. And yes, we’ll see yellow ribbons, and feel for the agonies of the parents of dead or captured soldiers, we’ll wince at awful images, but it’ll be relegated off the front page. The humanitarian catastrophe, the site of children with swollen bellies, all an unfortunate bi-product. One we'll live with on the golf courses during the summer. Until maybe an Iraqi version of the "MyLai incident", but even then, we'll be too worn down with our own problems to truly bother with it -- or so it could be if we stay asleep and allow the Bushies to continue to prosecute this war in our name.

War informs and awakens or how to find the activist within

As dead bodies mount; as anger and resentment build; as all the horror that is the heinous conduct of war toll, I find myself fighting darkness and gloom. As if the very burning oil fields and fires from the smoldering ruins of bombed out buildings were invading my sweet spring air from so many thousands of miles away.

I should have been deliciously happy as my little girl jumped up and down excitedly at the first site of daffodils this past Saturday. Yet my response was to repeat the mantra that she is shielded from the knowledge of advancing war and horror. Watching her leap with joy could not prevent the thoughts of some sister mother in Baghdad or Basra; her young daughter worried and fearful of bombs and lightless nights.

I am so angry I can barely contain myself. I am angered by the waste of human life. I am angered by those who promulgate this war for their total lack of regard for the cost. I am angered by the mendacious use of moral certitudes that inform the world view of those who sought so hard and so long to place us all at such a precipitous point.

Would that I am wrong in my thinking – but if ever we were at a razor’s edge it is now, our own 21st century version of the “Guns of August” which led a former generation into what became the Great War or World War I.

And if I feel anger – I also wrestle with the impotence of my voice raging out against the latest updated internet news bulletin or news broadcast in real time from the war’s front lines. Keep with me at my desk at work, a little open window of “Baghdad” so that I can watch the aftermath of bombs falling hot and loud into the night, leading me where, I wonder. To a succession of teary eyed breakdowns at the horror of it all? To the recognition (if ever I needed one) that life really only is moment to moment – and that one ought to make damn sure one is in the right one?

Or that art or what one can call the process that leads us to extraordinary flights of creative wonder and outwardly to creative expression must take hold. Can inform on some higher plain the “way” to reject such base and horrendous paths as war – and further one’s own outer edge of activism. Activism as expression – as a relentless push towards living in the kind of truth that shouts it out. That won’t allow for evasions or half measures. That states so clearly and sharply a present tense declaration. I am … we are … it is.

I am reminded of the factors that influence a boxer. The rightness of body aside, wherein in a boxer’s body is fully and completely conditioned, a boxer must also have a clear mind. A mind that takes in all the calculations, all the factors of parry and thrust and mental fluidity that allow for truth in the ring. The state of “I am”.

Any true athletic feat has a similar fluidity of purpose. Skaters, skiers, divers, pitchers – as alike as painters, sculptors, writers, poets.

Each has remarkable moments of fluidity – leaps of activist fancy that propel to some extraordinary moment that which brings about the clean leading edge, the perfect stroke, the word that flows from one to the other. And it is this very activism that can and must be found if we are to survive the lunacy of states that act in the interests of those who are antithetical to the creative spirit.

My activism propels these words and rejects the welling tears in my eyes and heart.

I am today and just as I shout it out I know too that we must all strive to shout out a present tense existence; impel our selves to be at our best to fight against those who would capture our world as we lay sleeping.

On worry or how not to think about war

I am trying not to worry about war. This is a hard task as I have spent my life worrying about things great and small. And not having been satisfied with merely worrying, it seems that I’ve worried so much that it has permanently changed my genetic structure as evidenced by the early manifestations of “Worry Syndrome” that my young daughter is exhibiting.

Isabella’s worry syndrome came out in full force this morning when she said, “Mommy, I’m a little worried that our telephone doesn’t work.”

Our telephone doesn’t work because there was a fire in the building behind ours which housed the telephone cabling box for the block.

For her burgeoning worry last night, she had me draw a picture of how our telephone connected to the telephone box. I drew the telephone, the wire connection at our windows, the gardens below and the box located on the wall of the burned building. I also drew an example of what the inside of a cabling box looked like. This satisfied her a little, but it was with her again this morning as she pondered how the telephone man would fix the box.

“Can I see, Mommy, can I see?” she asked. And with nothing to see, I lifted her up to look out the window anyway which gave her a view of the garden and building behind it. “Thanks,” she said. And for the moment, at least, her worries were at bay.

Now I tell myself the same thing. I examine the diagram of all the war scenarios. I look up and over – and not seeing anything have to move on. Have to not worry because it is nothing I can affect and no amount of ferreting through the online articles linked by The Drudgereport can bring me any closer to resolving or affecting the problem.

Even writing won’t solve the problem, though at least I can talk it out a little. Give voice to my sense of being voiceless. Bring my bones into a great and giant rant and having let out the scream, go forward with the lovely ordinary things that make up a life. My ordinary morning without worry was for Isabella and I the sweetness of waking to school in cold crisp air. We held hands, she rode on my shoulders, we held hands some more, and she demonstrated her numerous big girl-isms net of worry.

Perhaps the changed status of having become a mother has in some way heightened my sense of dread – though I recall in the last war walking in Paris during Desert Storm feeling no less unhappy about the process. The difference is only my perception of the fear. There is likely a woman in Baghdad with a wondrous three year old with a preponderance for worry. What must she be thinking now?

The day before a new world. Give or take.
That’s the sentiment.

My three year old is blissfully ignorant of such things – but I wonder for how long.
Mommy, what’s war?, she’ll ask. And I’ll explain. It’s a fight baby. It’s a fight between two sides that can’t use their words anymore. This she’ll understand. She has arguments with her friends and with me sometimes. What I won’t say is that people die in wars. That they suffer horrendous wounds. That children traumatized by war my relive their experiences over a life time. That our current war does not carry the nuance of just war. And that we ourselves will suffer mightily as a nation because we do not wage war under the protection of a banner of just war.

And what happens if it does find its way to our lives. Brooklyn lives lived quietly in sight of all those alluring targets. And that is how one thinks these days. What are the targets, what are the opportunities, how will they play out?

Okay, so the Iraq thing is just a matter of taking out the very power apparatus “we” put in power in the first place, right? Only instead of a CIA play, we’re using 300,000 foot soldiers. That would mean we’ve been in the first strike game all along, wouldn’t it? Only we played it smaller and quieter. Full of stealth – and in our 1968 Iraq play we were a little less ugly than in our Chilean adventure of a few short years later.

So who is kidding whom here … really. This “pre-emptive” thing. What was Viet Nam? I don’t recall that the North Vietnamese ever bombed us? This has been the game for years. Only now the first strike pre-emption dogma is out in the open – because the equation of the global game has changed. Without a big bad barrel of Soviet missiles staring us down we don’t ever have to worry about who will or will not blink. So all of those little wars, all those chess moves on the great game board no longer require the subtly of moves that were in existence since the end of World War II. And hey, why should we be subtle … we won, right?

So. Morning.
New York weather update -- bone chilling kind of cold and maybe snow.

I'm at my temp job. I'm not very busy and have already done my job searching for the morning - I. e., checking all the websites for jobs. It is a difficult process. This morning I had only one possible maybe to send my resume to. In my previous work life, I worked for a software development company. I ran the client side of the business and used a standard line during interviews to the effect, that if you like working with people who play speed chess at lunch; you've come to the right place.

Well anyway -- that job is long gone and now I'm relying on my skills as a typist to ease our cash flow problems.

The point of the story though is that the place was populated with great people. And smart. Smart about how they approached what they did, and smart about the world. A typical lunch time conversation (when not talking code or chess moves) might include politics, late night music, art, arguments about American foreign policy, or Chinese policy towards Tibet (that discussion almost led to a fist fight). Get the picture?

And now, in the midst of an extraordinary crisis in America with respect to both our short and long term survival as a nation, lunchtime talk at my temp job (a real estate asset management company) include such topics as acrylic nail treatments, upcoming weekend sporting events (Wednesday, Thursday & Friday) or sporting events from the previous weekend (Monday and Tuesday), skiing, who is and is not "liked" by whatever group happens to be sitting together, soap opera story lines, the latest reality TV show, Oscar nominations and unflattering JoLo pictures (was she or was she not wearing her panties).

I feel as if I've been propelled into some sort of alternative universe. Kind of a Star Trek/Twilight Zone thing. Where the country I cherish has developed a first-strike swagger that would impel any western hero of note to outdraw if only to wipe the smirk off the other's face. Get the picture? The kind of swagger where the only response possible is, “you'd better make it count buster, ‘cause that's going to be your last shot.”

What we're doing now is upending our entire mythic "self" as nation. And not so unlike the complexities of myth and reality that John Ford strove to explore in his post-WWII western films – wherein we had to confront the horrors of war and its aftermath, as well as our complicity in the realpolitik of alliances forged more on the basis of expediency than our sense of moral purpose. We are faced now with similar dilemmas: our security, our sense of well being and our “face”, as balanced by the exercise of our power.

In John Ford’s films, the hero always remains the hero, even as he (read America) is confronted with more and more complex and ambiguous moral dilemmas – however, in his films the choices confronting the hero inevitably come down on the side of good. Even in Ford’s flawed and imperfect rendering of our moral bankruptcy in “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964), following the trek of the Cheyenne from their squalid Oklahoma reservation to their ancestral lands in Wyoming. There is room for redemption in the character of the Calvary officer played by Richard Widmark. And though the setting of this film in the time of our early involvement in Viet Nam seems to presage our own moral lapses as a nation in such incidents as Mylai a scant four years later in 1968 – we are now fully forty years on. A post-Watergate society. Having survived the fall of Saigon, the oil crises of the seventies, Iran-Contra, adventurism in Panama, Grenada and Somalia, the Gulf War, the loss of our great enemy, in the break up of the Soviet Union – and numerous other internal and external pressures that bring us precisely to now. A time of great trauma – even as we cast about for some way of proving our omnipotence.

What we miss – and grieve for, is not so much even lost innocence, but reason. Reason in the form of an understanding of what could possibly drive such hatred, and reason in the sense of some clear moral course upon whose star we could attach ourselves: such that in our actions the clarity of our behavior would reveal a worldview that through its consistency and evenness, could allow for such morally ambiguous choices as whether to war or not in the name of some greater good.

To say that the link to war in Iraq is the notion that that baddy Saddam could in some conceivable future sell arms or make available a bag of tricks to allow for ever more spectacular big bang against the United States and other western countries is to miss the point. That is played out daily in the arms sales that fuel the 30 or so wars in process on any given day.

Rather, we ought to be examining the more fundamental question confronting our society that would see us blindly striking out with bigger and more technologically savvy weaponry – when we have not yet confronted why the fall of the towers (which I watched with an aching heart) would see us so close not only to complete and utter moral bankruptcy, but on the verge of collapse ourselves. America should be stronger than that. And if not – is it perhaps because we had already transformed so completely from our mythic self so as to leave us with nowhere to go. The seeds of corporate malfeasance, greed and corruption, the seeds of our complicity in the drug trade, in sponsoring the sale of the very arms we now fear with such terror have borne their fruit in the very way we cringe with fear of the bombs and bombast of terrorists.

I have lived in a lot of places and traveled to many more and no matter where I ever went, I was greeted as a friend. This was precisely because I was American. Because my very appearance in small villages in the back of beyond – a lone American woman, spoke of how great a place I came from because it afforded me the opportunities to be curious. To go out and seek in the small back roads towns of China or Thailand, Turkey or Russia, the humanity that touched my own – and by extension touched the myth that was America.

What we are called upon to do now – is to engage in the dialogue; to fight for what is ours. Our county, our history, our future belongs to us. And as we confront the great choices that will create our future – it is up to us to turn off our television sets, to forgo our salons and golf courses and ski resorts, to walk away from one more beer or one more hit of cocaine to wake up and take control of who and what we are.

The hero of myth is always aware – where we have let ourselves down, is in allowing ourselves to be lulled to sleep, whether by the forces of our daily toiling, or the self-imposed indulgences of too much excess coupled with too much pain and suffering.

Unfortunately, our leaders reveal all to well through their actions and their language that much of their desire is take that “burden” on for themselves. The fear is that in acquiescing, we may forever lose our American self.

I needed a space to say I am. Something that is not husband, 3 year old daughter, the crazy quilt dash of temping for little bits of cash while looking for the "big one" -- or the sense that I've lost my friends in the process of embracing a new life, but haven't yet found the means of expression to have it all make sense.

This is a start. A place to commence on a journey of getting out a lot of words about a lot of things. And what is more out than in a place of dialog and exchange, whether it's about recipes for soup or a site about a trip to Kenya.

I love too that the community is out and about. A global village light years beyond all of the impossible dreams the 60's communications guru types ever thought of. And I just love the idea that my bit of stuff about how my day is or isn't going, forms part of whole. Something that can become part of someone else's experience. Part of the pastiche of thought and process that might inform another's rant -- or something that might reach what another is feeling.

Before husband and baby -- and what seems like an epoch ago, I did a lot of traveling. In a small town called Lake Toba, in Sumatra, Indonesia, I sat waiting for a ferry to take me to an island in the middle of Lake Toba. A woman offered to sell me peanuts, I didn't want any but none the less something drew us into conversation. As it turned out, we were the same age: 38. She had seven children and an errant husband in Jakarta working in a sneaker factory. And I was single and on long slow backpack journey through Asia. Nothing could have been more different about us -- and yet we clicked. Laughed a lot about the silly rich tourists who were being overcharged by the stall merchants at the market that bordered the quay. And felt the affinty of me "out there", her "inside" -- as if perhaps we were living a bit for each other. She with children to love and care for, the family I didn't have at the time. And me with nothing but a backpack and the desire to see the world.

All of which is a long way of saying that the blogger.com concept feels sort of the same.

A place to be out there while being inside. To get things all untangled. Whether it's the anxiety aroused by the crazy notion that we might actually war on Iraq, et al, or the maddening ire aroused by cookie crumbs in my bed.

And so it goes.

Red Hook, Brooklyn,
February 26, 2003