An Alternate Witness

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.