or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love
Today, as the war in Iraq enters its fourth year, with no end in sight, I want to reflect on where we all were before it all began. To that end, here’s something I wrote in February of that year, as the country was girding itself for war and many of us were wondering why the whole world had gone so mad and why there didn’t seem to be anything that could be done to stop it…
* * *
“Where do you move when what you’re moving from is yourself?”
Never Ending Math Equation – Modest Mouse (Building Nothing Out of Something)
Floating in the ocean, staring up into the sky. The current carries me off; I am nearly asleep. No movement except the gentle paddling of me feet. Lying in bed in the early afternoon with her head resting on my arm, her hair laying across the pillow, her hand in mine, our fingers intermixed. I kiss the top of her head and she moves to look at me, smiling. The lights of the city are long behind me. I turn off the car and step out into the cold night, look up into the dark night, shiver. Thousands of stars have come out of hiding. The milky way stretches across the sky. My muscles are weak. I’m crying. Why am I crying?
Pitch black. No movement. Only sound, like a steady heartbeat. My toes feel the tension, and then relax as the music flows through my body, tantalizes, and stretches me far beyond my immediate environment. I can feel myself floating away…
What have I left behind? I have given up so much but it is so difficult to quantify or even be sure anything is gone. I am constantly astonished to discover that I have become someone very different from my old self. Still, I have not lost myself. I still feel like the same person at times. I have not lost myself. I am constantly in motion is all. Life is negotiation.
It does seem, however, that the give and take has, of late, meant more and more compromises. I would call myself a pacifist, but I am uncomfortable about the question of violence. I would declare myself an idealist, yet I am pragmatic to a fault. I ask myself, is there no choice but to become more conservative, more boring, more content as time carries me along?
Gloria Anzaldúa came to Whitman last year. At dinner, she asked a question: “what is the biggest current crisis in your life?” I had no answer. My life contains no crisis. But on reflection I realized that was my answer. No crisis? One is building. This will not be an apocalypse. This struggle is against ten thousand miles of green grass in every direction with one road etching its way into the horizon, completely straight. I am moving but…what is there to be found? My crisis is lack of crisis. My heart churns with the need to be directed at something, someone, somewhere, anywhere. I write to discover a new direction – to generate a crisis within myself.
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“There are plenty of warriors I know and love, people far more valuable than myself, who go to war each day, knowing in advance that they will fail. True, they are less “successful” in the most vulgar sense of the word, but by no means less fulfilled.”
–Arundhati Roy, “The End of Imagination”
As I stare at my computer screen, I ponder the latest news on Iraq. Hans Blix has issued a deadline of March 1 to begin destruction of its weapons of mass destruction. Like all of the previous deadlines, this one will likely pass without significant event, but will draw the world ever closer to an outright war. My purpose in writing is not to talk about whether such a war is justified; I feel that it is not, but I am not writing a manifesto. Instead, I propose to write about myself, my life, and the beauty that surrounds me. I hope that by doing so I will communicate the value and importance I place on life of every kind, the great gift that we are all given. I hope that I can in some small way help myself come to terms with the horror, the disgust, the pain, and the violence. I write tonight because to not write would be to sacrifice the part of myself that still believes a world can be discovered that is less obsessed with violence, less reliant on dispossession of those who are different.
The people who may die in a war have nothing to do with me, except…they do. They are being and will continue to be killed in my name, as a tax-paying citizen of the United States of America, a voter in the land of the free. The threat posed to national security, to my security, has been leveraged to create this war. If I am to come to terms with myself, then I must come to terms war—not just this particular war, but all wars. It is the attitude of war, the ubiquity of militarism, that concerns me.
The sticking point for me is not the horror of war – anyone who has read All Quiet on the Western Front, watched footage of Vietnam, or talked to anyone who was actually on the front line is fully aware of its terrible reality. However, what constantly eludes me (and I think most people) is the utter stupidity, the banality of war. The carnage on the ground is real, so real that it becomes hard to look out without wincing, without shuddering. The reasons for war, however, are obscured behind layers and layers of diplomacy, of hidden agendas, of mistaken assumptions. The question I want answered is this: How can we fight wars when we all know how terrible they are? How can we not have come up with a better way to resolve disputes?
Perhaps I have a responsibility to finding a better way. If nothing else, I believe I have a responsibility to speak out, to formulate my objections. I was at home last weekend as the protests occurred across the country. I considered attending, but several things prevented it. Most importantly, I was hours away from the nearest location in Seattle – to attend would have meant not seeing my family on one of the few days I have had a chance to see them this year. I asked myself what protest would have been meant to accomplish. I would not have been going with the belief that my presence would result in a monumental political change; I would have been going because events such as these force me to remember why life itself is so very important. I would be attending as a show of solidarity, to demonstrate my own emotions, to try and come to terms with my role as a citizen of a state that kills.
I was unconvinced that a protest would help me with those goals. I decided that the best way I could respond to life being taken from people in Iraq would be to pay very careful attention to my own life and remember the beauty I encounter every day, to reflect on the wonder of the world that no amount of violence can ever truly kill, to sit with my family and talk about the war, but also to sit with my family and talk about our own lives. I feel the same way tonight as I write. Because on a day when the very existence of many human beings is threatened, on a day when thousands around the world are dying, on a day that is really no different than any other day in that it contains the most astounding instances of beauty as well waves of misery and pain, on such a day I will not let myself be made numb, I will not let my voice be confined to a single form of resistance accepted by the state, I will say what I have to say and smile like I’ve never smiled before and cry like it was the world’s last day.
Because it is the last day for so many, as well as the first day for many others. I can never forget this, for it is this cycle of renewal that enables me to remain sane. The things that are most beautiful are those that can hurt us the most. Life itself is the most profound and wonderful thing in the world. In it is contained every twinkling star in the sky, every smile, every kiss, every heartbeat, every mother and every father. A universe in which none of these things mattered is almost beyond my comprehension.
Still, I do not mean to imply that those who go to protests are in any way wasting their time or that my choice to stay and write and talk is somehow superior. It is the choice that made sense for me, and the choice that made sense for them. For all of us, I hope that our choices help us become better people. Will I indeed become a better person? It depends. The chances of me consistently acting in ways that are beneficial to myself and my ideals are small. Fortunately, such a measurement is not necessary. I try, and that is not enough, but it is something. No matter what I do, no matter what happens, I have give myself over to believing in belief itself.
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“I was thinking about how everyone is dying
And maybe it’s time to live”
P.S. You Rock My World – Eels (Electro-Shock Blues)
I do not propose that we ignore terrible things in our lives and just hope they disappear. Indeed, such an approach is exactly the problem. People who live their lives on Novocain may be free from pain but they are barely alive. Life hurts sometimes; this is an unfortunate reality. Or maybe not so unfortunate. I am not sure I want life if it doesn’t include hope, love, and beauty, and inextricably tied to all these things are risk and the potential for monumental pain. If all I have to look forward to is the opportunity to survive until the next day, I cannot say that I am really alive. Instead, I will seek out beauty every place I can, I will hope beyond all reasonable expectations, I will believe that even the worst people and the worst things can be made right once again.
This is difficult because I do not believe any of us are entirely free from evil. I discriminate unconsciously, sometimes even consciously. I am not proud, but it is difficult to stop. I feel fear and mobilize that fear toward violence. I search myself and discover that there is nothing about George Bush that intrinsically separates him from me. Given certain circumstances, I might be capable of ordering violence. I can sense the persuasive appeal of his arguments, even. Saddam Hussein is not a very nice person – I must admit that if something could be done to end the threats posed by him to the world, to his own citizens, I would be amenable. The line between “doing something” and “going to war” is wide, but not impassable.
But the opposite is also true: I do not believe the capacity for goodness can be completely stamped out. I will not let it happen. You cannot give it to me. We, like most everything else in this crazy world are a mixture of colors, emotions, dreams, desires, hopes, hatreds, and compassions. If no firewall exists between “doing something” and “going to war,” then the true battle is whether we can teach ourselves to occupy a non-violent space. I am perpetually struggling to free myself from struggle. I am fighting to end the need to fight. This battle, however, defies my imagination, defies my ability to graph and chart, to plan and organize. There is no opposing army, no Nazi Germany to attack within the confines of my own soul. Every time I try to identify evil, I am left wondering what I am even thinking about, where in myself I can find the characteristics that I want to call evil. It is too conceptually elusive for my mind to comfortably understand.
Ultimately, I believe that evil is not the real problem. The primary enemy is simple ignorance. Hatred is very rarely driven from the core of one’s being. Most often, it is simply a matter of being afraid of that which we don’t understand, that which is different from us. We see murderers and want to demonstrate how far beyond the pale their crime is in comparison to the terrible things we all do in our own lives. This black man killed a white woman? Death to him. My company dumps nuclear waste on Indian reservations…that’s just life.
So really, my hope is that on nights like these I can think just a little about the piece of a murderer that exists within me and realize all the reasons why that part of me has not taken over. Instead of fearing difference, I have tried (not necessarily succeeded) in seeing difference as beauty. I stand outside looking at the stars and the moon. There is something that almost transcends beauty about the night sky on a peaceful night. It is because I can remember things like this that I am able to face the everyday horrors that life inflicts on us. Tonight I am thinking about civilians in Iraq but I am also thinking about music that makes my hands shake and my muscles tingle. I doing so I discover that we solitary idealists may indeed have something to contribute. Perhaps it is simply our capacity to care, to struggle against all odds with no belief that struggle will result in change. We struggle simply because to be human is to struggle. To be human is to find something worth caring about and to live it out as best we can.
* * *
“Love is free, free is love
Love is living, living love
Love is needing to be loved”
Love – John Lennon (Plastic Ono Band)
What do I care about? In some sense, it is far beyond the scope of words to describe—it seems almost offensive to confine it with language, to force a structure on a concept that surpasses structure. Still, it deserves to be exhumed and be given a moment in the sunlight. In one word, I would simply name it love. Call me a hippy if you like, but I have found no concept better suited for explaining my existence. My experiences on this earth, every person I have known, every time I have cared, every time I have cried, all of these things and infinitely more have contributed to me. The beauty of this world can only be explained once I realize that it is only beautiful because I can see it as such.
Love is anger, but love is not hatred. Love is the way I can hate being hurt and hurting, the way I can hate the whiteness of my skin and the way I can hate that I am a man. Love encompasses hate; it supercedes it and makes it into something new. My hatred grows and is nurtured. It emerges as a butterfly stripped of its violence.
Love is embarrassment. Love is feeling like a fool for hoping. Love is the realization that I will not find a person who is perfectly matched with me. Love is the knowledge that we will get into fights and we will bicker and argue and we will sometimes not want to talk to each other. Love is knowing that all of this simply means that beauty is real and not a myth, not a plastic creation. If love were perfect and easy, it wouldn’t be love; it would be an advertisement. When it is painful and hard and scary, it is life.
Love is magic. Love is waking up from a dream and not knowing which is real. Love is a smile. I can lose myself forever in some people’s smiles. Love is tears. Love is tears. I cry and the world washes away. Love is not being afraid to cry because it makes me look weak. Love is not having to cry because I don’t need to be strong. Love is a world at peace. Love is imagination. Love is finding someone who sees me as something beautiful. Love is knowing that I am beautiful. Love is becoming beautiful because someone believes that I am.
Love is separation. Love is knowing that I am a white heterosexual male, aged 17-65. Love is opening myself to pain and suffering because in that opening lies the possibility that those who don’t have the choice to shut out their otherness can find me and I can find them. Love is the fear that in doing this I am only re-asserting my power. Love is the terror that I am doing harm to others. Love is the terror…the terror of not knowing. Love is finding a part of me that no one has ever seen and showing it to the world, even though the world doesn’t care and doesn’t want to know. Love is fear. Fear of atomic bombs and mushroom clouds, of environmental destruction and gun shots, of burning swastikas and hateful stares. Love is a hug that can make all of this go away. Love is a hug that can’t make any of it go away but can create something beautiful to struggle against it. Love is my desire. Love is overcoming fear. Love is affirmation. Love is life. Life is forever.
I speak a word and the world changes. I write to re-discover the part of myself that feels this way. The words convey something profound, not because of how they are framed or my technique. Their profundity arises from their simplicity. I love you.