I’m still sad, I’m still scared
Apr 16, 2003 Read/heard/seen
And she says it best:
I turned off the VCR, and CNN came on. I was still thinking about Annie Sullivan yelling at Helen Keller’s parents, who were satisfied to have a daughter who dressed herself and ate with utensils instead of her fingers. She said that Helen was only housebroken, and that wasn’t enough, that obedience wasn’t worth anything without understanding, that their daughter was entitled to language, to a means of understanding, and expressing what she understood. And on the television were pictures of tanks — it looked like miles of them, rolling up a dirt road. And soldiers shrouded in so much equipment that it called for more imagination than I’ve got to picture a human being in there. Sort of a masculine burka, giving off an air of invulnerability, instead of creepy inviolability. And to be honest, the image simply scared me. I’ll debate the reasons for this war all you like, but that mechanical and monstrous image, so devoid of humanity, so incapable of human emotion, stood for something ugly in my mind. Does this represent my country — this monster? It may be unfair — it is unfair, impressions always are — but the war seemed to me at that moment to be a massive, hard, and ugly creature, rolling mindlessly along, without a human face, too mechanized to feel, or even really experience, anything. And if I were a different person, with a different cast of mind, I might scream at somebody, “Can’t you see what this war is? It’s all there, in that picture.” Instead I turned off the television.Maybe my reading of the image had something to do with the fact that I saw it after a day of witnessing quiet courage — not just my daughter’s: child after child got up, made mistakes, and kept going — and I was still wrapped in a old movie’s faith in a vulnerable person’s courage, in that strangely out-dated belief that full, expressive humanity matters, and obedience is for dogs. If I’d watched it after a football game, or had been immersed in those images all day, or day after day, maybe I would have gotten a different message: We’re big, we’re bad, we’re the best.
Her entire blog is shattering. she’s detailing the looting in Iraq right now.
I have totally avoided war news other than the occasional Time magazine at my inlaws and scatterings of NPR at home. Part of this is because I want to shield Noah from the atrocities and a bigger part of it is because it scares me so absolutely that I have trouble thinking or functioning when I spend too much time listening to the news or talking about what’s happening. (Thus the dearth of war talk on my blog.) It’s at the pit of my stomach, this coldness when I listen to war news.
A couple of my friends have been frustrated with me because they’re news junkies right now but I can’t make myself do it. But I tell you, I’d feel a lot less terrified if Gore was commander-in-chief right now. I hate to think about our current administration all puffed up with their macho masculine selves, justifying their war mongering. They’re enjoying this way too much now that we’ve “won.”
I obey my Move On missives and pray daily but I don’t watch the news and most of the time I try to stay focused on what’s happening here in front of me.
I wish everyone could be safe.
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