On War and Freedom
I've got so many different threads running through my mind right now I'm not sure I can pull them all together, especially on as little sleep as I got last night, but there's so much noise in my head that I need to put some of it to words.
One mother's protests, the remembrance of the events that ended another war sixty years ago, and ongoing justifications for our present quagmire have left me thinking a lot about war and honor and freedom and patriotism and what it truly means to love one's country and the value of service.
It started with a post to another blog last night, when I got so tired of reading that speaking out against the war dishonors those who have died in it, that to say the Iraq war isn't noble is a slap in the face to families who have lost loved ones or to those in service, that criticism of this president and this war is unpatriotic, and that antiwar protestors just hate America or some other vitriolic nonsense. I wish that we as a country could come to understand that America makes mistakes, that its leaders make the wrong decisions, that however the noble the intentions of the members of the armed services (and let's be brutally honest and realize that not all their intentions are noble - the desire for vengeance certainly doesn't represent the best of my country nor does the justification for torture) that nobility doesn't necessarily lend justness to the particular cause they are engaged in. It does no discredit to their service to say that this war is wrong; rather, I think it does a greater injustice to those with honorable intentions for service that their courage and sacrifice is being used for dishonorable purposes, for a war built upon deception and carried out with utter ineptitude at the highest levels by those who themselves have never been in harm's way. It dishonors their service more that through this war, our leaders betray the very values, the very heart of this country that likely led those with the best intentions to serve in the first place. Their faith in this country has been misused to create an America unworthy of their sacrifice.
Second train of thought....I'm tired of America being conflated with its leadership. I thank God that the ideals and idea of this country is greater than what the current Administration represents. To criticize this war and the policies of this president is in my mind to call America to being something better - something more than the self-righteous and all-pwerful - to living up to the promise and dreams it inspires. America is not its government and sometimes not even the majority of its people - it is the challenge to live democratically and peaceably with those whom you disagree most deeply, it is the promise of equality of opportunity that we have yet to reach, it is the call to both individual and social responsibility - the pursuit of happiness and the general welfare, it is the dream of freedom held in tension with the demands that freedom makes (to speak out against injustice, to call our leaders and those who wish they were to accountability, to share the resources and blessings that freedom grants) on its citizens.....and America has so often not been these things and has become less so of late because of those who would defend her "right or wrong," who fail to learn from her failings, who prefer the false projection of the "common man" over the real thing who dares protest the other's betrayal, who turn patriotism into a religion of national self-worship - this is not my country nor what I would want it to be, nor is defending what they would have it be something worth dying for.
Wilfred Owen wrote it so powerfully -
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
A third thread...the canard, "freedom isn't free" that assumes what is being fought for is freedom, that assumes this war was about keeping us safe, when what it seems to be protecting (a president who can't come to terms with the complexity of the REAL world and a military-industrial hegemony) is far more dangerous than the enemy it creates. There is so much talk of having to take the fight "over there" so that we don't have to face it here, but that thought in itself betrays freedom because it becomes conditioned upon what others do. The true cost of freedom is the risk that we may not always be safe, that we most certainly won't always be liked, and that other free nations most certainly have a right to challenge the power we too much possess. I avoid references to "the enemy" because when we start to define ourselves by their actions we cease to be truly free - the perhaps hardest part of terrorism to fight is what it would have us become.
But, I have strayed from my initial impulse against the "freedom isn't free" platitude, which I think some people may find a bit callous. I am tired of being told that I owe my freedom to those in military service, especially with regard to this war, which, if anything, has made our country less free. I am not ungrateful for their service, but let's be honest and recognize that every cause our armed forces have been engaged in has not been for the pursuit or protection of freedom - maybe I can buy the "for our way of life" line (depending on how the "our" is defined), but you can't convince me that I should be thankful for our country's every use of military force. So often "freedom isn't free" just becomes the all too pat excuse for turning a blind eye to our country's dirty little wars.
Ah, that is harsher than I mean it to be. I truly do stand in awe and humility before the thought of my goddaughter's father who is in the Army and has served in Iraq and my dear friend who was forced to be a single mom for his months of service. And, I cannot begin to imagine the pain of losing someone close, much less a son, daughter, mother, father, brother in war. I have cried over the stories of families and also of the broken soldiers who have returned. But, it does them no service to make their sacrifice the means for perpetuating a lie.
I would likely be called a coward because no, I will not join the military, though I am young and able, because I believe their are better ways to fight for my country, though I can't always claim to be a part of those either. I will not have my love for this country impugned because I don't believe war without end is the answer to the challenges we face. I'd like to think that sometimes the work I do is to help make America a place worthy of someone's sacrifice - but I am too timid. I think I owe my freedom just as much to Martin Luther King, Jr, to Jeanette Rankin, to the abolitionists and suffragists, to all the protestors and journalists who expose the lies of war, to all those our nation has exploited to reach its position of power, to the hard work, sacrifice, and faith of my parents, but no less to the crazy chance or blessing of my birth here and to a God who loved us enough to die, exposing the darkest extent to which we exploit that wild freedom we have been given.
I am tired and I'm just as likely as not right now to repudiate half of what I have written because gratefully, I have the freedom and hopefully, the fortitude, to change my mind when confronted with a greater truth than my own experience. But I will let it stand because it has been a relief to write and maybe with it out of my head I can start living like I mean it.
Come, my friends, 'Tis not to late to seek a newer world
posted by A. Leigh @ 9:20:00 PM
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