Ten
years ago, I marched with my kids against the war on Iraq which my country’s
government was beginning. It was an unusually mild day for March in the upper
Midwest. I remember that we got over there early, and that for some reason, we
were making our signs at a table in a local coffee shop instead of having made
them at home ahead of time. I know there were two; the kids decided what to
write on them. I only remember that one said, as did many other signs that day,
“NO BLOOD FOR OIL.”
It
was the biggest protest I’ve been to. And so many more were marching around the
country and the world against that war. Kevin, then 14, held up one of the
signs as we crossed a bridge under which cars drove by on the freeway below. He
stopped for a moment, pumping the sign he held with both hands up and down,
while some of the passing motorists below honked their support. For maybe the
last mile, Ryan, who’d just turned six, wore out and I carried him. I felt
strong. We could not help feeling good that sunny, mild day, seeing so many
others who likewise were demanding better.
Later
that day, after we’d arrived back home, a friend called and I mentioned to her
what we’d been doing that day. “Did you guys think they were gonna stop the war
just because you protested?” she asked. I said that people can’t base what they’re
going to do on that idea, that we have to do what we believe is right without
knowing the specific effect it will have, or else no one would do anything. I
said that at least all these protests show that so many people even in the U.S.
are against this war.
I keep thinking now that we should have done
more. A day of protests communicates the message that many feel strongly that
what they are protesting against is wrong. This is important. I’m not in favor of the
cynicism that drains the energy out of any effort before it can even begin. But
too often we continue with our lives in ways too similar to how we were living them
before. I wonder what might have happened if all of us against that war had concentrated
our efforts on preventing it or ending it. If it was a part of our own nation
that had been slated for attack, a place where many of our loved ones
lived, how would our efforts have proceeded?
In
Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?,
Judith Butler says:
If I identify
a community of belonging on the basis of nation, territory, language, or
culture, and if I then base my sense of responsibility on that community, I
implicitly hold to the view that I am responsible only for those who are
recognizably like me in some way. But what are the implicit frames of
recognizability in play when I “recognize” someone as “like” me? (36)
She
goes on to delve into the question of “whose lives are mourned, and whose lives
are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into
those who are grievable and those who are not” (38). This of course is always
what allows us to go about our lives while horrors are wrought on other lives.
To someone who supported the war because “in war, you gotta do what you gotta
do,” another friend of mine said, “Okay, put your mother over there and drop
the bomb on her.” This kind of reasoning has been expressed so many times that
those who have already divided lives into grievable and ungrievable populations
let it slide right off of them. Yet I wonder how many fresh ways we must find
to express what is already true in that statement.
The
war, as we all know, went on as scheduled. Now we continue to be faced with the
question of how we are to appropriately respond. What will we tell our children
and their children – not our own biological children so much as ‘our’ –
humanity’s – children? How long will we
keep shirking our responsibility by invoking the magical capacity of the newest
generations coming of age to be the ones to save the world, as if this should
or could all be on their shoulders? If anything is worn out, it is that same
old hollow premise.
So
I am trying to understand where to go from here. I am trying to understand what
an appropriate response can be to the war that finally ‘ended’ yet is a
genocide that keeps unfolding. A 2011 article entitled “Depleted Uranium Weapon
Use Persists, Despite Deadly Side Effects” says:
In October
2009, the Iraq minister of women's affairs and other medical and
scientific signatories sent a prescriptive letter to the United Nations (UN)
General Assembly regarding the plague of cancer and deformed babies in Falluja
and other Iraqi cities. They cited doctors' reports of unprecedented rates
of babies born dead, deformed and severely disabled. "The use of certain
weapons," they wrote, "has tremendous repercussions. Iraq will become
a country, if it has not already done so, where it is advisable not to have
children." http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2791:depleted-uranium-weapon-use-persists-despite-deadly-side-effects
What happens to a country where it is not advisable to have children? How are people in Iraq to bear this catastrophe? Here is a Democracy
Now segment entitled: “Ten Years Later, U.S. Has Left Iraq with Mass Displacement &
Epidemic of Birth Defects, Cancers.” http://www.democracynow.org/2013/3/20/ten_years_later_us_has_left
In it, we see some of the profoundly harmed babies born in Iraq,
babies born with one eye in the center of their heads or what should be
internal organs outside of their bodies. And at the same time, I see the
familiarity of all infants for me in these babies.
I remember how worried and hurt I felt
when Sean was born with pneumonia and had to stay in an incubator for a week. I
had to feed him for hours at a time from a special bottle because he was so
weak. What then do these mothers, fathers, family members, and other caregivers and
loved ones bound to these babies feel? They have no hope for their babies to
pull through and be okay.
How could this immeasurable harm have
been done to a whole segment of our fellow human beings after all the horrors
that had already been perpetrated in the 20th century? How did we
let this happen? If it had not happened yet – if we could go back to 2003
having seen these images, what would we do differently?
Butler says: “Open grieving is bound up with
outrage, and outrage in the face of injustice or indeed of unbearable loss has
enormous political potential” (39). She does not mean this cynically;
rather, she explains why it is that the dominant political powers have tried so
hard to keep us from the outraged grieving at these unbearable losses.
I have no adequate answers. I communicate
with my kids and others about the results of the war. I’ve never agreed with
keeping some kids in happy bubbles while other kids and those they love suffer
and die, especially when the former group of kids belongs to a nation whose government
keeps inflicting such harm on the places where the latter groups of kids live. Our
fellow human beings in Iraq and Afghanistan deserve our outraged grief at what our government has done. And they deserve far more. They deserve for it to have never happened. I have heard plenty of arguments against letting kids know
about these atrocities but I am not convinced by those arguments. I believe
that our kids, as soon as they are old enough, need to know what these wars do
to people so that they will never be misled into participating in them.
And we whose government sent DU into
these places and into these babies and their parents have no right to sink down
into paralyzed despair in the face of all this, either. Every time that we
respond to these atrocities by withdrawing into private despair, it is a kind of
complicity. I understand despair all too well, but it’s wrong to let it make us powerless. Drowning in despair is not the
kind of direct responsibility that the various leaders have who chose to send
depleted uranium into Iraq, Afghanistan, and various places in the U.S. where
it’s manufactured, but it still allows these things to
go on. Rather, we need Judith Butler's outraged grieving that moves us to act.
Depleted uranium has a half-life of
4.5 billion years. This is never going away.
I am still trying to know what raising
kids or caring for any segment of humanity should now be and should have
already been.
Butler, Judith. Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? London: Verso, 2009.
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