No Glory In Unjust War On The Weak

TUCSON -- I cannot find the glory in this day. When Ipicked up the newspaper and saw "America Strikes Back!" blazedboastfully across it in letters I swear were 10 inches tall--shouldn't theyreserve at least one type size for something like, say, nuclear war?--my heartsank. We've answered one terrorist act with another, raining death on the mostwar-scarred, terrified populace that ever crept to a doorway and looked out.

The small plastic boxes of food we also dropped are atravesty. It is reported that these are untouched, of course--Afghanis havespent 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 beenhalted by the war.

We've killed whoever was too poor or crippled to flee, plusfour humanitarian aid workers who coordinated the removal of land mines from thebeleaguered 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 RushLimbaugh handbook: traitor, sinner, naive, liberal, peacenik, whiner. I'm told Iam dangerous because I might get in the way of this holy project we'veundertaken to keep dropping heavy objects from the sky until we've wiped outevery last person who could potentially hate us. Some people are praying for myimmortal soul, and some have offered to buy me a one-way ticket out of thecountry, to anywhere.

I accept these gifts with a gratitude equal in measure tothe 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 feelthis way precisely because I can imagine that horror.) More subtle adversariessimply 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 ofcatastrophe, so shut up and drive.

I fight that, I fight it as if I'm drowning. When I get tofeeling I am an army of one standing out on the plain waving my ridiculouslittle flag of hope, I call up a friend or two. We remind ourselves in plainEnglish that the last time we got to elect somebody, the majority of us, by astraight popular-vote count, did not ask for the guy who is currently telling uswe will win this war and not be "misunderestimated." We aren'tstanding 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, andstill try to love it back.

It is not naive to propose alternatives to war. We could bethe kindest nation on Earth, inside and out. I look at the bigger picture andsee that many nations with fewer resources than ours have found solutions toproblems that seem to baffle us. I'd like an end to corporate welfare so wecould put that money into ending homelessness, as many other nations have donebefore us. I would like a humane health-care system organized along the lines ofCanada'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 renewableenergy sources instead of forcefully patrolling the globe to protect oilgluttony. Because, make no mistake, oil gluttony is what got us into this holywar, 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 intosafer, less gluttonous, sensibly reorganized lives. If this were the face weshowed the world, and the model along with a military budget the size ofIceland's.

How can I take anything but a child's view of a war inwhich men are acting like children? What they're serving is not justice, it'ssimply 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 standready to judge Osama bin Laden and his accessories. If we were to put a fewbillion dollars into food, health care and education instead of bombs, you canbet we'd win over enough friends to find out where he's hiding. And I'd like topoint out, since no one else has, the Taliban is an alleged accessory, not theperpetrator--a legal point quickly cast aside in the rush to find a sovereigntarget to bomb.

The word "intelligence" keeps cropping up, but Ifeel like I'm standing on a playground where the little boys are all screamingat each other, "He started it!" and throwing rocks that keep takingout another eye, another tooth. I keep looking around for somebody's mother tocome on the scene saying, "Boys! Boys! Who started it cannot possibly bethe issue here. People are getting hurt."

I am somebody's mother, so I will say that now: The issueis, people are getting hurt. We need to take a moment's time out to review themonstrous waste of an endless cycle of retaliation. The biggest weapons don'twin this one, guys. When there are people on Earth willing to give up theirlives in hatred and use our own domestic airplanes as bombs, it's clear that wecan't out-technologize them.

You can't beat cancer by killing every cell in the body--oryou could, I guess, but the point would be lost. This is a war of who can hatethe most. There is no limit to that escalation. It will only end when we havethe guts to say it really doesn't matter who started it, and begin to try andunderstand, 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 somethingnew." 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 aredropped on them from above, then please, in the name of heaven, I would like tosee it. I would like to see it, now.

(Barbara Kingsolver is the author of, inter alia,"The Poisonwood Bible" and "Prodigal Summer." By arrangementand courtesy, Zmag, dated October 14)