No Glory in Unjust War on the Weak

By BARBARA KINGSOLVER,

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 dollarsinto 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.

-- Food (For@Thought.com), October 16, 2001

Answers

This woman describes my exact sentiments far more eloquently than I ever could!

-- Food (For@Thought.com), October 16, 2001.

Our country has just incurred a savage, unprovoked sneak attack on our homesoil that killed 6000+ civilians of all races and nationalities and put many more out of work and her only response is an impassionad call for more feel-good Liberal programs. Unfuckingbelievable.

She drowns in Liberal guilt. If it weren't for the US military that she so disdains, she would be drowning in her own blood.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 16, 2001.

Barbara Kingsolver

BTW Barbara, do you know what radical Muslims do to pantheists?

-- (Roland@hatemail.com), October 16, 2001.

Don't worry Lars, Dubya is still dropping the bombs. They finished pulverizing all the military targets almost a week ago. Dubya said they weren't going to target civilians, but that was just to keep the liberal scum like this lady happy. We're going after every last one of those filthy bastards!! Cheer up! You should be happy to know that we are still bombing!

-- Go U.S.A.! (we're@the.greatest!), October 16, 2001.

This essay is full of platitudes, generalizations, and outright wrong information.

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), October 16, 2001.

What's a platitude?

-- dummy (never@heard.dat), October 16, 2001.

If it weren't for the US military that she so disdains, she would be drowning in her own blood.

You just don't get it, Lars. It's BECAUSE of the U.S. military aggression over several decades that terrorism has arrived on our shores and may ultimately result in ALL of us "drowning" in our own blood. I'm sick of the Bully On The Block knee-jerk reactions of chest-thumping and rage. You want to address the symptoms with no regard to the CAUSE. Unless you get to the CORE of the problem, you will be forced to continually repeat an endless loop of violence without satisfactory resolution. But that would suit you just fine, wouldn't it, so you can perpetuate your chest-thumping and rage. How self-serving of you to take out your stress and frustrations with bombs. How hypocritical to bemoan our casualties and then derive an inner joy and pleasure from terrorizing other countries in the same blood-lust manner. But blind men cannot see and all of mankind suffers as a result. Your mindset saddens me because you remain so low on the evolutionary scale. Perhaps there's hope for you in the next life. You may get there sooner than you think.

-- Food (For@Thought.com), October 16, 2001.

Food--

We disagree. No point in either of us discussing it further. I hope you are right. I'm convinced that you are wrong.

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 16, 2001.

KINGSOLVER: "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."

She's off to a bad start, seeing as how we're in no way bombing the "populace". Faulty premise. Raining death my ass.

KINGSOLVER: "The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are a travesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course--"

I expect they'll be touched when needed - at any rate, this does not diminish the ongoing effort to provide humanitarian aid to those displaced by war.

KINGSOLVER: "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."

Kingsolver does not know that we've killed *any* poor or crippled people - though perhaps if these poor/crippled folks were living in abandoned helicopters or near landing strips, and if they refused to take advantage of the freaking month they had to find safer lodging... well, who can say. It *is* unfortunate that a couple of bombs went astray, but not unexpected. Civilians were certainly not targeted, and were given a more than fair chance to get out of harm's way. It's the best we can do.

KINGSOLVER: "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: ..."

Ah, when in doubt, associate all who disagree with you to some evil totem of the opposition.

KINGSOLVER: "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."

Whee!! Apparently, this is all tied somehow to the whole election fiasco - if only we'd known!

To belabor the oft-made point, WE HAVE NEVER, EVER "gotten to elect somebody, the majority of us, by a straight popular-vote count..." EVER. More on this in a moment...

KINGSOLVER: "It is not naive to propose alternatives to war."

Probably the only statement she makes here that I agree with.

KINGSOLVER: "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."

So the solution is to swallow Naderism hook, line and sinker, eh? *And* attempt to export it to the Middle East, too? If we did that, we would present such a benevolent face to the world that everyone would love us. That's the plan.

OK, never mind that "corporate welfare" can, in fact, help to prop up flagging industries and keep people employed and off the streets i.e. not homeless. Never mind that no other nation that I'm aware of has ever "ended" homelessness. Never mind that there's no way in hell Gore would have signed Kyoto or successfully nationalized health care. Never mind that, if Afghanistan were such an important player in oil, it wouldn't be one of the poorest freaking countries in the world. And especially never mind that Barbara Freaking Kingsolver thinks it would be a great idea to "sensibly reorganize" *MY* LIFE!

What gets me is the very idea that our failure to do these things (along with the "fact" the the wrong guy is president, of course) has engendered the hatred of the world, and brought evil down on us. It's the *EXACT* analog of Falwell/Robertson saying that turning our back on their version of God did so. Both statements are equally stupid and reprehensible in my book.

And "...a military budget the size of Iceland's"... I think it may actually be Barbara's brain that's now rubble.

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), October 16, 2001.

Your mindset saddens me because you remain so low on the evolutionary scale.

I think we've settled on the Neanderthal era. [chuckle]

RC: Flint could have written that.

-- Anita (Anita_S3@hotmail.com), October 16, 2001.

This Kingsolver cunt is just another whiny liberal bitch, still on the rag that Bush is President. She and all of her pacifist friends can burn in hell.

-- Another (loud@mouth.Barbara), October 16, 2001.

Someone I know in the Pentagon says that Dubya's goal is to kill at least 6,000 innocent civilians, that way the score will be even. This is what he means when he says he wants "justice". He believes that as soon as we kill the same number of people that were killed by the terrorists, the WTC victims will rise from the dead and everything will be "okie-dokie" once again.

-- (dubya's@brilliant.revenge), October 16, 2001.

Nuke the crap till they glow kill every last one of those bitches.

-- (h1@h1.com), October 16, 2001.

My, some people have enough hatred that who needs bombs.......just drop them on bin Lauden. My personal opinion is that every radical hawk that wants to bomb the hell out of a country should be the bombs. SPLAT

-- notelling (alwayswatching@psychowatch.com), October 16, 2001.

NUKE NUKE NUKE BOOM BOOM BOOM DEAD DEAD DEAD HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY

REVENGE ROCKS DA MOTHA FUCKIN HOUSE!

-- EEK (eek@eekbot.com), October 16, 2001.

"Someone I know in the Pentagon..."

Please. Perhaps you meant to say "Someone I met in the Pentagram.."

-- Imagine no religion... (atheist@yahoo.com), October 17, 2001.

-- Norm (norm@backatwork.com), October 17, 2001.

I find the words 'unjust' and 'weak' as incorrectly used here. Osama is anything but weak and this war is anything but unjust. Peace is the objective and we won't have it as long as Osama and his troops are allowed to continue to reign terror. Once this is over and we pour tons of $ into third world countries in the form of teachers, not cold cash. We educate them in how to take care of themselves.

We need to pull out. I had always agreed with Bush's campaign position (which none of the liberals liked) to get the fuck out of these countries, to stop sending our military on 'humanitarian' missions. Funny, now they 'see the light'.

-- Maria (anon@ymous.com), October 17, 2001.

plat·i·tude (plt-td, -tyd) n.

A trite or banal remark or statement, especially one expressed as if it were original or significant. See Synonyms at cliché. Lack of originality; triteness.

Also, Kingsolver doesn't seem to realize that the reason that Iceland's military budget, whatever it is, is low because the U.S. has bases there!

-- Buddy (buddydc@go.com), October 17, 2001.

"RC: Flint could have written that."

Heyyy!

-- RC (randyxpher@aol.com), October 17, 2001.

Platitude--A small aquatic, egg-laying mammal, native to Australia and Tasmania

-- Lars (lars@indy.net), October 17, 2001.