I know why you're here. I mean, at least I think
I do. I think I know what you want on a
Friday.
You want something light.
Something like the froth on good cup of cappuccino. Something that maybe makes
you smile. Something that may make you think, but not too
hard.
I'm sorry to disappoint you this
week. I just don't have it in me.
Did you go there? Did you read the story? Did
you click on the photo link, and "click for more
photos"?
You need to. I need you to.
I want you to see. I want you to witness. I'll
wait.
Two hundred children and adults
killed. Five hundred people hospitalized. Most of them with bullet wounds in the back . Shot while trying to
get away from what had been a three-day living hell, while their tormentors
sneered at them, forbidding them food, even
water.
Children. Children going to
their first day of school.
Did you
know that Russian children traditionally bring flowers to school on their first
day? I didn't. Now I
do.
I don't pretend to
understand Chechnya. It is a far place, full of people we do not know. And I do
know that the Russian military can be heavy handed at times - their reliance on
brute force, on mass and shock, has been a defining trait from the time of the
Czars. But they were not the first to raise the rifle in Chechnya. They were not
the first to pull the trigger. And everything else that follows after, starts
with that. Aim the rifle, take the first shot, reap the
whirlwind.
I am not Russian. I am
American. But I am a father, who sends his children to school in every
expectation that they will come back with homework, and teachers they don't
like, and courses that they hate. I do not expect them to come home from the
hospital with bullet wounds in their back. I do not expect to run to their
school, wondering where they are when the announcer breaks in on the television
with the news that something horrible is happening. I do not expect to search in
vain after the worst happens. I do not expect to go from corpse to corpse,
raising sheets covering the mangled bodies of children, hoping against hope not
to see the face I love more than my own life. I do not expect to find that
face.
But I think I can
imagine how terrible it must feel. Because I also am a
parent.
Israeli police said
two Palestinian suicide bombers detonated their explosives within 20 seconds of
each other on two buses about 100 yards apart near city hall, shredding bodies
and spewing clothes, groceries and schoolbooks through the shattered windows.
"There were burned
bodies on the windows and at the entrances of the bus," said Gershon Kalimi,
chief of the fire brigades who said he reached the first bus to explode five
minutes after the blast. "Then we went to the other bus and we saw the same
horrible images: burned bodies, burning bus, trapped people, people lying on the
ground, people calling for help."
I
am not Jewish, I am a Christian. I am not one of those bible-thumping End World
types that sees the Rapture coming whenever Israel is attacked. I grew up in a
neighborhood near a Jewish temple, and so many of my childhood friends were
Jews. Because of the way I was raised, and the country that we live in, that
didn't mean anything to me as a child. Some people were Baptists. Some were
Episcopalian. Some were Methodist. Some were Jewish. Some weren't religious at
all. We were all friends.
My support
for Israel had always in the past been intellectual - they are a democracy, a
thriving, argumentative, difficult democracy. Just like ours. In a place where
such characteristics are all too rare. They are successful in creating a society
based on justice, the rule of law, the right of the individual, in a place where
all those things are as alien as pimento olives on the moon. They believe in
freedom, surrounded by those who believe in fealty. But all of this was at a
distance, theoretical. News reports were something you'd cluck over. Isn't it a
shame?
I have spent many years in the
Navy, in the service of my country. One does not think to ask another what his
or her religion is, or if they have one. It is not a topic of discussion. It is,
in fact, proscribed by naval tradition. So I don't know how many Jews I've
served with over the years.
But I
live right now in a place that is near a temple, and many of my children's
friends are Jewish. So many of my friends are as well. We recently were invited
to a couple of Bar Mitzvahs. I wrote about that. Several of the guests had
travelled all the way from Israel for the celebration. We spoke at length. They
went home, and when I had read of this attack, I was heart struck in a way that
I hadn't been before. It was personal - what if this had overtake some of my new
friends? How would I know? Who do I call? What do I
do?
And what was this for? Revenge
for the death of monsters. Reckon the calculus behind that:
Eighteen innocents have paid with their lives for the death of two beasts who
themselves sent dozens of young Palestinians to their deaths, in the hope of
killing hundreds of innocent Israelis. The results? Three thousand dead
Palestinians. One thousand dead Israelis.
These men were called
leaders.
It is senseless, and stupid
and vile. And now my knowledge of that far place, full of people I do not know,
has changed.
President
Bush had a gaffe the other night, if like me, you define a gaffe as when a
politician inadvertently blurts out the
truth.
So let me commit
some gaffes of my own:
I don't care
how deeply you feel about your cause, your certainty in its rightness or the
depth of your anguish and the breadth of your humiliation. If you storm a school
and take children hostage, you are evil. If you shoot children in the back when
your plan goes awry, you are evil. If you climb on a bus filled with innocent
people just trying to make their way to work, people who do not wear a uniform,
whose opinions and thoughts and dreams you cannot know, intending to take as
many of them with you to the clearing at the end of the path simply because they
are not your coreligionists, you are evil. If you fly airplanes full of innocent
people into buildings filled with thousands of other innocents, you are
evil.
Let us view the world as it is.
Let us accept the testimony of our times. Let us admit to the existence of evil.
Let us
witness!
And
then let us decide what we are to
do.
--------------------------
So
maybe we don't get a "win." Maybe there will never be a truce, a peace treaty or
a ticker-tape parade. Maybe that's just the world that's left to us, a stark
choice: Darkness or light. Fight or
die.
I know what choice I will
make.
This kind of terror is
carefully constructed: It is designed to make the most amount anguish visible to
the greatest number of people. It is intended to intimidate. It is meant to
strike fear.
I decline to be
intimidated. I refuse to be afraid. That is not how I feel. Yes, I am sick to my
stomach, but most of all by God I am
pissed.
-------------------------
No.
I am not really a Russian. Neither
am I an Israeli. When 9/11 happened,
Le
Monde declared that now, "we are all
Americans." But it wasn't true then, and it isn't true now. It's facile, trite,
and meaningless to attempt to throw the mantle of victimhood across our
shoulders, sharing in the tragedy from a safe distance and thereby diminishing,
diluting - say it! Cheating the victims of their misery by cheapening it with
mere solipsistic rhetoric.
We are
not Russians. We are not Israelis. We are
not.
But
they
are of what
we
are of.
We are the civilized world,
all of us. Russians, and Israelis and Spaniards and Kenyans. And we are locked
in a death match with Nemesis.
Fight
or die. Wake up to it. No more talk about Vietnam. That was then, this
is now.
This is
real.
Posted @
07:58 PM
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Posted in
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Sendit
|
Credo
"Sign on, young man, and sail with me. The stature of our homeland is no more than the measure of ourselves. Our job is to keep her free. Our will is to keep the torch of freedom burning for all. To this solemn purpose we call on the young, the brave, the strong, and the free. Heed my call, Come to the sea. Come Sail with me." - John Paul Jones
"Pardon him, Theodotus; he is a barbarian, and thinks that the customs of his tribe and island are the laws of nature" --George Bernard Shaw, "Ceasar and Cleopatra"
"And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music."--Friederich Nietzsche
