An Alternate Witness

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=9783129

I can't believe it. The Americans and their Iraqi lackeys are building a wall around the Shi'a community of Adamiya in northern Baghdad. Despite spokesman for the US military command in Iraq, Major Gen. William Caldwell's comment that it is not usually America policy to build walls, I am reminded of the wall under construction between the United States and Mexico. Not only that, but who do you think is really paying for the so-called "Security Barrier" (i.e. Big Concrete Wall) that Israel has almost finished building around the West Bank? At the very least, the United States' government is perfectly transparent about its support for the Anti-Palestinian Wall. That's surely the wall Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki was referring to when he said he was "afraid that the wall may remind us of other walls we reject."

But let's be realistic here. Do walls really work? No wall is going to keep destitute Mexicans out of the underbelly of the United States' economy, nor keep outraged, desperate Palestinians from attacking their Israeli opressors. How successful was the Berlin Wall at keeping capitalism out of the Soviet Bloc?

I can only think of only one wall that was truly effective at confining a targetted population: the wall around the Warsaw ghetto. Do we really want to follow Hitler and Himmler's example, though?

There must be a better way. What ever happened to negotiation, democratic processes inclusionary of militant Iraqi nationalists, humanitarian aid, and "winning hearts and minds"?

This morning I and other residents received an email from the campus Apartment Housing Office with "Virginia Tech" in the subject line, and a message to the effect that this is a multicultural community and we should be careful not to make generalizations about large groups of students based on the actions of a few. I was amazed that anyone would have generalized from one clearly deranged student's actions to the entire Korean and Korean-American community.

I hoped that I would see a frequent client at the writing center, a South Korean chaplain studying counseling, but when I found myself coming to an early finish with an East Asian international student writing about Korea, I took the opportunity to ask him if he knew of any incidents against East Asian students on campus. While he concluded that he believed the university's Korean community was overly anxious, he mentioned a few accidents that left me feeling uneasy. He said he had heard that all the Korean students have left Blacksburg, VA, that two of our city's four Korean churches have canceled outdoor services scheduled for this coming Sunday, and that his pastor had told him about incidents of high school students ganging up to beat on Korean classmates. He also said he had heard that the South Korean diplomatic mission to Washington, DC, had wanted to attend and perhaps say a few words of sympathy at the convocation at Virginia Tech in which Pres. Bush spoke, but that the US State Department told them that, as the shooter was a Permanent Resident, i.e. an immigrant to the US, South Korea had no reason to get involved.

I'm disappointed in my fellow Americans. After September 11th, in which al-Qaeda overtly claimed to be attacking American society, I expected some backlash against Arabs and Muslims, though I still thought it would be small-minded to blame an entire ethnic or religious group for the acts of the extremist few. But it didn't even cross my mind that anyone would blame Koreans and Korean Americans generally for the acts of this single student, who was clearly disturbed and acting from personal motives.

But then this student I was tutoring said that Koreans, both here and in South Korea, were expressing feelings of guilt that one of their own could do such a terrible thing. This, he thought, was unnecessary, but I was reminded that I was in Switzerland eight years ago this week when the Columbine shooting happened, and I felt the same impulse to apologize and explain that this was not the American way.

Even still, the biggest tragedy of Virginia Tech, the airplane crash that killed a Yankees ball player last fall, and countless other such incidents, is the way we as a nation respond. It is sad to me to see that our first reaction in a tragedy has become this: "Police say that they are not yet ruling out terrorism." As if that were the primary motive for violence in this world.

I was a college Senior in Political Science 101 on the first anniversary of September 11th. The professor wanted to spend that day's class remembering the tragedy of a year before; knowing that almost half the students in the class had been high school Seniors in New York City a year earlier, I was dreading the class. I was wrong to do so. I was surprised at how clear-headed and eloquent my classmates were. In particular, I remember the words of a girl from Oregon. Her mother woke her that morning with the news, and she said her first thought was that she didn't have time to mourn, because someone was going to have to make sure that our civil liberties would not be stolen away as the nation reacted.

When I heard what had happened at Virginia Tech, I thought of the girl from Oregon, and I thought, I can't mourn because someone has to remember the dead, beseiged and violated elsewhere.

Don't get me wrong, this is a tragedy, as unprecedented a tragedy in its own way as September 11th. My junior high was the site of a school shooting, and my sympathy goes out to the students of Virginia Tech and the people of Centerville, VA, home town of the shooter and several of his victims (and some friends of mine).

But let us not neglect to notice that today--two days later--was an extraordinarily bloody day in Iraq. More than a hundred were killed and over twice that many injured. It is absolutely right for Pres. Bush to pray at Virginia Tech, and for universities and schools all across the country to re-examine their emergency procedures and the measures they take to monitor the mental health of their students. However, we must be careful that such actions are not taken at the expense of the attention Iraq, Darfur, Nigeria, Russia and other troublespots also deserve, even require.

Taxes are supposed to support government programs to support and protect the people served by that government. If that were truly the case, I wouldn't mind paying taxes at all. As the Finns and Swedes say, we gladly pay 50% in taxes, because the government takes good care of us. Or as Elton John has said, he has no interest in moving to the U.S. where the taxes are lower, because his taxes support the poor in South London who buy his records and make him rich.

Half a century ago, the CEO of General Motors made fifty times what his average worker made, and paid well over half that money back to the government. Now the CEOs of major companies pay easily 500 times what their average workers make, and pay far less than 50% of that money back in taxes. Yes, there are philanthropists like Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey and the Ford Foundation who are privately distributing their wealth all over this country and the world; they are major contributors to the fact that Americans, per capita, make more private donations to people and programs in impoverished nations than the citizens of any other nation in the world.

But if we taxed Bill Gates for half his yearly net income, he'd still have millions of dollars to put into philanthropy, and I suspect that his taxes could almost single-handedly provide universal health care in the United States. Instead, take a look at this report of UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre, "Child Poverty In Perspective: An Overview of Child Well-Being In Rich Countries" (http://www.unicef-icdc.org/publications/pdf/rc7_eng.pdf). Of the 21 countries surveyed, the United States ranks in the bottom third in 4 of the 5 categories for which US ranking was provided, including 20th in Family and Peer Relationships, and Behaviours and Risks, and 21st--that's last of the richest nations!--in Health and Safety! That's worse than even the significantly poorer former Soviet Bloc nations of Poland and the Czech Republic. According to this report, 22% of American children under 18 live in homes taking in less than 50% of the median national income; that's dead last of the nations polled. One in eight American 15-year-olds polled has less than 10 books in his or her household. The United States has among the highest rates of infant mortality and accidental child deaths of these rich nations. At 75%, the United States has the 5th lowest rate of 15-19-year-olds in school. American children are judged to have the second worst relationships with parents and peers of the 21 nations surveyed. American children have the worst health behaviours of the nations surveyed, the highest child obesity rate, and the highest teen pregnancy rate. One in 5 American children rate their own health as 'fair or poor.'

Could we not be using our tax money to improve these numbers? Why are we not?

Instead of making the richest nation in the world the best place in the world to be a child, we are engaged in a quagmire in Iraq. We were told that fighting the "terrorists" there would keep us safer here. This is unlikely to be the case. Our arrogance in Iraq has cost us more friends than it has made us; this conflict has undermined our soft power and image in the world, and made us look like the big bully on the block. And we are suffering at home for this war every day.

The money we have spent in Iraq could have provided health insurance to nearly 250 million American children, or have built over 3.7 million units of public housing for the millions of hurricane displaced or otherwise impoverished and homeless persons, including children, in the United States. Or the money we spent in Iraq could have paid for a year's Head Start expenses for 55 million children, or hired over 7 million new teachers, or provided over 20 million 4-year scholarships for Americans to attend college. You can see a running tally of these figures at http://costofwar.com/index.html. Or we could use the money we're spending in Iraq to reduce world hunger by half in 10 years, immunize children around the world for that time, stem the tide of AIDS in the world, and still have money left over (http://costofwar.com/numbers.html)! Any one of those things would improve our image and thereby increase our national security far more than any war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran or elsewhere.

As you pay your taxes, I challenge you to consider where that money is going, and whether you are comfortable supporting the actions your money supports. Because if you're not, it's time to take ownership of that money and of your government--for the people, by the people--and demand change!

It's a terrible thing, as the minister said Sunday morning, to hear on the morning news that over 130 Iraqis were killed and an entire market obliterated by a truck bomb in Baghdad. It is a still worse thing to find that you have become numb to the horror. I heard that news on NPR this morning, winced, and immediately pulled out the expresso machine and started making coffee. I fear and dread the day when I don't even wince.

There came a point, when I was studying the Holocaust as an undergraduate, at which I became numb to the horror, able to watch footage of emaciated, gassed inmates bulldozed into a hole and not even blink. It was a relief to reach that point, because I wanted to be able to make witness to these terrible occurences, to understand them intellectually so that I could join the fight to keep such horror from happening again. Of course, in my idealism, I didn't fully realize that it was happening all the time: Rwanda, Kosovo, Darfur, East Turkistan, Tibet, Inner Mongolia, Chechnya....

I started this blog full of outrage and anger at Bush, Blair, Olmert, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and all the others who abetted and even instigated wars, apartheid, death and destruction in Palestine, Lebanon and Iraq. I had lived in the Middle East, I had talked to Baghdadi mothers and children about their lives there, I listened to Sid Ismahan and others as they thrust the pictures from Abu Ghraib prison into my face and said, "Look at these well! These are our brothers!" I bawled my eyes out in front of two dozen Jordanian teachers because I thought (mistakenly, I hasten to add) that I had heard one of them say, "How can she be upset about a stolen pen when people are dying in Iraq?"

I must remember....

• I'm still angry about the ghetto-ization of the West Bank and the boycotting of Hamas.
• I'm still anguished about those rendered homeless and plagued with PTSD in Lebanon.
• I'm still apalled that a bunch of political appointees locked up in the Green Zone could think they know what's best for Iraq without ever meeting an Iraqi.
• I'm still frustrated with Bush's total disregard for the opinions of both his constituents and the experts.
• I'm still horrified at the neglect of physically and psychologically mained Iraq and Afghanistan War Veterans.

I want to find that fire again, and let it devour the despair and helplessness I feel here, as I sit in class and talk the problem to death, as I languish before my computer and listen to the body count rise on NPR, listen to the Bush and Cheney build their case to add Iran to the two fronts--Iraq and Afghanistan--where we are already losing the so-called "War on Terror."

Because if we lose the tiny sliver of flame we have, I shudder to think where that might lead us.