I’m for Peace

At 6:30 pm on a weekday, Mopac is choked with traffic. As soon as you muscle your way
onto the freeway and race off, you suddenly stop for no apparent reason. Traffic then lurches forward and everyone gains about 25 feet, only then to abruptly stop once more. You nervously look into the rear view mirror to make sure the person behind you is aware that he must come to a complete stop in about… two seconds. It’s stressful. NPR, at times, can make the commute much more enjoyable. Their coverage of the terrorist attacks and the aftermath have been exceptional. Last week we were treated to Fresh Air each evening at 7:00. No stupid shows about cars, blah Blues shows, etc.

But yesterday there was a PRI special, called “youth radio.” High school kids, most from Berkeley, were enlightening us about how we must respond to the fact that over 6,000 Americans were murdered two weeks ago. Their collective message was that we should… not respond. Y’know, cause that would be like, bad, or something. I have been getting a lot of this lately. Stopping at Jo’s for a bagel and Orangina the other day, I was
greeted by the bouncy, smiley girl (who is seriously great, even though I’m kinda clownin’ her here) and she inquired if I was “for peace, or for war.” I kind of laughed and then replied, “What kind of question is that?! Of course I’m for peace!” She nodded her head in approval and handed me my change. I then saw a sign that loudly proclaimed that Jo’s is against any kind of vengeful retaliation and was “for peace.” Oh, I get it now.

The most egregious example of “We asked for it, we deserved it” was experienced at a Modest Mouse show last week. Just before the band came on, I was eavesdropping on two lads discussing the attacks. One of them just started flipping out: “Oh dude! This is just totally the war-machine-industrial-complex-blah-blah-blah-blah so Bush can get votes! Our foreign policy is just soooooo fuc%&ed up!” There were some other insights about various “indstrial complexes.” I about died when he referred to Afghans as “Afghanistanians.” I’m pretty sure this cat had something to say about being “for peace” too, but I had to move cause the asshole kept blowing cigarette smoke in my face. It was an amusing peek into contemporary discourse from today’s pacifist.

I think what is so irritating about this is that there is an underlying suggestion that those who do support a fierce economic, military, and diplomatic retaliation just “don’t get it.” If only we could learn to let that hate go and love each other. Maybe even try to understand where their rage comes from. That is the one right there, correct? Once us hate-filled warmongers understand where the anger comes from, change our foreign policy in the Middle East, the Islamic militants will call off the jihad. Noam Chomsky, the ?ber-intellectual dinosaur, also asserts that “we may try to understand, or refuse to do so, contributing to the likelihood that much worse lies ahead.” Again, the message is that if you’re for peace and tolerance, than we must collectively understand why they act the way they do. I will assume that one of his points of contention would be our involvment in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But given what we know about Osama bin Laden, there is absolutely no reason to think anything we do in the foreign policy arena and beyond will result in a retraction of calls to war against “the West.” And no, Michael Moore, Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol was not the reason either! (
“In just 8 months, Bush gets the whole world back to hating us again. He withdraws from the Kyoto agreement…”)

A now famous 1998 Al-Qaid, and their ilk cannot be negotiated with. Maybe some understanding is in order: as Salon.com lefty Joe Conason put it, “barbarism is what needs to be understood?and resisted with force.”

My comprehension of America’s involvement in quagmires such as
Contra funding, Somalia, and Clinton’s bombing of the Sudan is totally inadequate. But put simply, our country has never done anything to another state, or people, on the scale of the NYC attacks on September 11, 2001. “But what about..” No.

We all know that the Taleban and other militant Islamic fundamentalists are brutally oppressive to Muslims in Afghanistan (especially women). A Dateline special last night (I think it was Dateline) featured a British woman who had infiltrated Taleban-occupied Afghanistan
and disguised herself as a covered Muslim and documented some of the inhuman condtions people there are subjected to. It was horrific. I want to be clear: I am very much troubled by the possibility of even more suffering that these
people may endure. And it has been stated by Russian soldiers who invaded Afghanistan in the late 70s that we will probably not find well-marked terrorist camps to bomb. The terrorists will likely be
in villages with their families and civilians. It is frightening to think of how messy this could be. But being “for peace” may require taking a serious look at the magnitude of the global terrorist threat. Simply writing off our multi-layered retaliation as just “revenge” is sophistic and a cop-out.

September 26th, 2001