In most situations, people tend to seek pleasure and avoid pain, whichgenerally makes sense.
I want to suggest that at this moment in history, U.S. citizens need to invertthat. If we want to become human beings in the fullest sense of the term, if wewant to be something more than comfortable citizens of the empire, if we want tobe something more than just Americans -- then we have to start seeking pain andreducing pleasure.
By that I don’t mean we must become masochists who live in denial of the joyof being alive. Rather, I mean that to be fully alive we must stop turning awayfrom a certain kind of pain and begin questioning a certain kind of pleasure. Imean this quite literally, and with a sense of urgency; I think the survival ofthe species and the planet depends on Americans becoming pain-seeking andpleasure-reducing folks.
Let me begin to explain what I mean by describing two conversations I had withstudents recently. One young woman came to my office the day after we hadwatched a video documentary in class about the Gulf War and its devastatinglybrutal effects -- immediate and lingering -- on the people of Iraq. The studentalso is active in the movement to support the Palestinian freedom struggle, andthe day she came to see me came during a period in which Israeli attacks onPalestinians were intensifying.
We talked for some time about a number of political topics, but the conversationkept coming back to one main point: She hurt. As she was learning more about thesuffering of others around the world, she felt that pain. What does one do aboutsuch a feeling, knowing that one’s own government is either responsible for,or complicit in, so much of it? How does one stop feeling that pain, she asked.
I asked her to think about whether she really wanted to wipe that feeling out ofher life. Surely you know people, perhaps fellow students, who don’t seem tofeel that pain, who ignore all that suffering, I told her. Do you want to becomelike them? No matter how much it hurts, I said, would you rather not feel atall? Would you rather be willfully ignorant about what is happening?
I could see the tears welling in her eyes. She cried. We talked some more. Icried. She left my office, not feeling better in any simplistic sense. But Ihope she left at least with a sense that she was not alone and did not have tofeel like a freak for feeling so much, so deeply.
A couple of hours later another student who had been in a class of mine theprevious semester came by. After dealing with the classroom issue she wanted toaddress, we were talking more generally about her interests in scientificresearch and the politics of funding research. I made the obvious point thatprofit-potential had a lot to do with what kind of research gets done. Certainlythe comparative levels of research-and-development money that went, for example,to Viagra compared with money for drugs to combat new strains of TB tells ussomething about the values of our society, I suggested.
The student agreed, but raised another issue. Given the overpopulation problem,she said, would it really be a good thing to spend lots of resources ondeveloping those drugs?
About halfway through her sentence I knew where she was heading, though Ididn’t want to believe it. This very bright student wanted to discuss whetheror not it made sense to put resources into life-saving drugs for poor people inthe Third World, given that there are arguably too many people on the planetalready.
I contained my anger, somewhat, and told the student that when she was ready tosacrifice members of her own family to help solve the global population problem,then I would listen to her argument. In fact, given the outrageous levels ofconsumption of the middle and uppers classes in the United States, I said, onecould argue that large-scale death in the American suburbs would be far morebeneficial in solving the population problem; a single U.S. family is more of aburden ecologically on the planet than a hundred Indian peasants. "If youwould be willing to let an epidemic sweep through your hometown and kill largenumbers of people without trying to stop it, for the good of the planet, thenI’ll listen to you," I said.
The student left shortly after that. Based on her reaction, I suspect I made herfeel bad. I am glad for that. I wanted to make her feel bad. I wanted her to seethat the assumption behind her comment -- that the lives of people who look likeher are more valuable than the lives of the poor and vulnerable in other partsof the world -- is ethnocentric, racist, and barbaric. That assumption is theproduct of an arrogant and inhumane society. I wanted her to think about why shelived in a world in which the pain of others is so routinely ignored. I wantedher to feel what, for most of her life, she has been able to turn away from.
I do not want to overestimate the power of empathy to change the world. Butwithout empathy, without the ability to move outside our own experience, thereis no hope of changing the world. Andrea Dworkin, one of the great feministthinkers of our time, has written, "The victims of any systematized brutalityare discounted because others cannot bear to see, identify, or articulate thepain." [Andrea Dworkin, Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a FeministMilitant (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 193.] It is long past the time forall of us to start to see, to identify, to articulate the pain of systematizedbrutality. It is time to recognize that much of that pain is the result of asystem designed to ensure our pleasures.
The pain of cluster bombs
It is my experience that people can feel empathy for the pain of others incertain situations, such as the pain of a loved one or friend, or in certaincases the suffering of people far away who are hit by a natural disaster orcruel twist of fate. But the key in Dworkin’s insight is "systematizedbrutality." Empathy seems less forthcoming for those victims, especially whenit is one’s own government or society or culture that is systematizing thebrutality.
When that pain is caused by our government, we are channeled away from thatempathy. The way we are educated and entertained keeps us from knowing about orunderstanding the pain of others in other parts of the world, and fromunderstanding how our pleasure is connected to that pain of others. It is acombined intellectual, emotional, and moral failure -- a failure to know and tofeel and to act.
Let’s take a simple example, the CBU-87, also known as the cluster bomb, whichis a part of the U.S. arsenal. It is a bomb that U.S. pilots drop from U.S.planes paid for by U.S. tax dollars.
Each cluster bomb contains 202 individual submunitions, called bomblets(BLU-97/B). The CBU-87s are formally known as Combined Effects Munitions (CEM)because each bomblet has an antitank and antipersonnel effect, as well as anincendiary capability. The bomblets from each CBU-87 are typically distributedover an area roughly 100 x 50 meters, though the exact landing area of thebomblets is difficult to control.
As the soda can-sized bomblets fall, a spring pushes out a nylon "parachute"(called the decelerator), which inflates and then stabilizes and arms thebomblet. The BLU-97 is packed in a steel case with an incendiary zirconium ring.The case is made of scored steel designed to break into approximately 300preformed thirty-grain fragments upon detonation of the internal explosive. Thefragments then travel at extremely high speeds in all directions. This is theprimary antipersonnel effect of the weapon. Antipersonnel means that the steelshards will shred anyone in the vicinity.
The primary anti-armor effect comes from a molten copper slug. If the bomblethas been properly oriented, the downward-firing charge travels at 2,570 feet persecond and is able to penetrate most armored vehicles. The zirconium ringspreads small incendiary fragments. The charge has the ability to penetrate 5inches of armor on contact. The tiny steel case fragments are also powerfulenough to damage light armor and trucks at 50 feet, and to cause human injury at500 feet. The incendiary ring can start fires in any combustible environment.
Human Rights Watch, the source for this description of a cluster bomb, hascalled for a global moratorium on use of cluster bombs because they causeunacceptable civilian casualties. Those casualties come partly in combat,because the munitions have a wide dispersal pattern and cannot be targetedprecisely, making them especially dangerous when used near civilian areas.
Even more deadly is the way in which cluster bombs don’t work. The officialinitial failure-to-explode rate for the bomblets is 5 to 7 percent, though somede-mining workers estimate up to 20 percent do not explode. That means in eachcluster bomb from 10 to 40 of the bomblets fail to explode on contact asintended, becoming landmines that can be set off by a simple touch. Human RightsWatch estimates that more than 1,600 Kuwaiti and Iraqi civilians have beenkilled, and another 2,500 injured, by the estimated 1.2million cluster bomb dudsleft following the 1991 Persian Gulf War. For decades after the Vietnam War,reports came in of children and farmers setting off bomblets. The weapons werealso used in the NATO attack on Serbia.
What does that mean in real terms? It means that Abdul Naim’s father is dead.The family’s fields in the village of Rabat, a half hour from Herat in westernAfghanistan, were sown with cluster bombs, some of the 1,150 reportedly used inAfghanistan. Some of the farmers tried to clear their fields; some of them diedtrying. Out of desperation, Naim said his father finally decided to take thechance. Using a shovel, the farmer cast three bomblets aside successfully. Thefourth exploded. The shrapnel caught him in the throat. [Suzanne Goldenberg,"Long after the air raids, bomblets bring more death," Guardian (UK),January 28, 2002, p. 12.]
Or consider this testimony from a 13-year-old boy in Kosovo: "I went with mycousins to see the place where NATO bombed. As we walked I saw something yellow-- someone told us it was a cluster bomb. One of us took it and put it into awell. Nothing happened... We began talking about taking the bomb to play withand then I just put it somewhere and it exploded. The boy near me died and I wasthrown a meter into the air. The boy who died was 14 -- he had his head cutoff." The 13-year-old lived, but with both his legs amputated. [RichardNorton-Taylor, "Cluster Bombs: The Hidden Toll," Manchester Guardian (UK),August 2, 2000.]