Greetings from the Twilight Zone

Greetings from the Twilight Zone…

The Prime Time War is supposedly over now, and tonight, Resident Bush will make a speech in which he undoubtedly will name the next target of American hostility. Meanwhile, amongst most people, the war has been quickly forgotten. Overnight, evening news shows switched from panicked, 24-hour war reports to stories of cats unwittingly carried cross-country on semi trucks. Towards the end of the war “coverage” there were the famous images of the falling statue, American soldiers bringing candy to Iraqi children, and villagers lining up for water supplies brought by the victorious conquerors.

But now the airwaves are silent of Iraq, and we can go back to business as usual. Emboldened warmongers use the short period of bombing and light American casualties to justify a war based on lies. They laugh as they watch their civil liberties disappear, as if inevitable. On tax day, I stood at the post office and handed out flyers about military spending. It was shocking to see how many people know exactly how their hard-earned money is spent, and aren’t outraged. In a country whose God is the dollar, you’d think that citizens would demand a say in how every penny is spent. But they just laugh and feel a moment of revulsion as they “get it over with,” and don’t have to think about it for another year.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with an old friend of mine, a progressive woman who’s active in the animal rights movement. She’s from an upper-middle-class Jewish family, well-educated and reasonably well-informed about world affairs. I told her about the looting and burning of the National Museum of Baghdad, the National Library of Baghdad, the orchestra, the hospitals, the government buildings. She hadn’t heard about it, but wondered how people could burn their own libraries. I don’t pretend to understand the mindset of a rioting mob — years of sanctions and wars and oppression will make a people desperate and unpredictabe. But the point is, the US military promised to protect those libraries and museums and hospitals, they knew what was going on, and they did nothing. The Marines were two blocks away, protecting the Ministry of Oil, while Hammurabi’s Code vanished. The irony is sickening. My friend’s response? “Well, they have to protect the oil, that’s Iraq’s only resource, and they’re going to need that money to rebuild their country.” I thought it was the conquerors’ responsibility to rebuild a country that’s been destroyed by war…. But wait, Afghanistan was conveniently left out of the Resident’s budget proposal for this year. How quickly we forget.

I also told my friend about Carlo Giulliani, Rachel Corrie, Darío Kosteki, Maximiliano Santillán, and others who have been murdered by governments in recent years. Of Carlo, she said, “well, he must have been doing something wrong if the police shot him.” No, his only crime was wearing a black mask and holding his unarmed fist in the air. “Well, they must have thought he was doing something wrong.”

Blindness. Blindness, forgetfulness, numbness, apathy, fear. These are the diseases we are faced with, the diseases we must cure in order to move towards peace. We are the healers, the shamans of our time, fighting back the monsters which live in our collective consciousness. But there is power in that, for our collective consciousness reaches across borders and oceans and barriers of all kinds, so that when one part of the movement is exhausted and disorganized, we can feel the support and energy from other places and other peoples who will keep the flame until we’re ready to stand up again. Here in America, the movement is resting, regrouping. But I read Indymedia, and I see the work people are doing all over the world, and it gives me hope and courage to keep moving forward. My gratitude and appreciation to all of you in Europe who are pressing forward so relentlessly and passionately, while we in America recover from the crippling wave of opposition from the media, the warmongers, and the politicians. Thank you for refusing to be silent, and for standing up to the global bullies who are trying to dominate all of us.