February 01, 2006

Choose Life

Lately I've been thinking about the following posts:

(1) Am I the only one who thinks members of the Iraqi military and resistance fighters are human beings? at Left i (nominated for a 2005 Koufax for best post):

George Bush's assertion that 30,000 Iraqi "citizens" had died was wrong, not just because it didn't give credence to the controversial Lancet study which estimated (more than a year ago) 100,000 dead, but because Bush was clearly and deliberately asked about all Iraqis, including "civilians, military, police, insurgents, translators."

[...]

Am I the only one who considers these people human beings, and no more deserving to die than the "innocent civilians" who everyone seems to be willing to recognize (albeit reluctantly in Bush's case)? For that matter, even if you consider them "guilty" (of what, I don't know), they are still Iraqis (95% of them, anyway), and still dead, and still part of the human cost of this war, and still deserve to be counted just as much as the 2150 American troops who have died fighting in the same war, especially when someone specifically asks about them.

(2) The difference between 9-11 and the bombing of remote Pakistani villages at Big Monkey, Helpy Chalk (another of Rob's posts was nominated for a best post Koufax - and it's also relevant to what I'm getting at here: "He thinks he did the right thing, because he protected his people. His problem is that he has too small a view of who his people are.")

Whatever the line is that separates American who kill civilians from al Qaeda people who kill civilians is, it is so significant that it makes the people from al Qaeda subhuman. You cannot talk to them, their demands are never reasonable, because the way they kill civilians is worlds apart from the way we kill civilians. Even when we torture innocent civilians, we rise above the action of the accursed enemy.

Of course, this all depends on the assumption that the lives of Pakistani civilians are as important as the lives of Americans.

I've also been thinking about Virginia Woolf, as I often do, and her masterful anti-war tract, Three Guineas, in which she writes, "...as a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world."

My loyalties lie with the dead. My loyalties lie with the peacemakers. My loyalties lie with those who value life, not those who callously mock it and sign it away. If a patriot is one who upholds national boundaries and values those on her own side of the border more than those on the other side, then I am no patriot.

This morning I was reading a poem:

In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,

I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.

In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night
and the male and the female
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,

I will honor all life
- wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell - on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.

- Diane Ackerman, I Praise My Destroyer

Posted by Cleis at February 1, 2006 02:40 PM
Comments

Oh wow Cleis, what a wonderful poem! Thanks for posting it.

Posted by: Andygrrl at February 2, 2006 06:32 AM