Thinking about Falluja

I remember when I was a young teen watching my grandmother in her living room standing in front of the TV news reports with film of the Viet Nam war. She never sat down. She just stood there silently watching with tears slipping down her face. I didn't feel it then, but I do now. I feel her sorrow.


Normally, although I have been sad and disgusted and frustrated and angry over what we are doing to Iraq (and what we have been doing to the world for a very long time), I still live an every-day life like many, if not most, Americans: a five-day-a-week job in the world of (Lower Class) Middle America. Tomorrow, many of my family and some friends are gathering for a tailgate party before the college football game (I don't know who's playing, and I don't give a rat's ass), and as I so rarely participate in anything, they are asking me to at least join them for the pre-game fun. Tonight, I have spent the last couple of hours reading the internet news and trying to get motivated to bake some muffins for the tailgate. And crying.


I have family members who support America's imperial foreign policies, still believing (or choosing to accept) the lie that we are a philanthropic, God-blessed country, spreading freedom throughout a tyrant-oppressed, Godless world. While the hundreds of football fans here and many other places this weekend are going to be laughing, light-hearted and comfortable, eating and drinking, and cheering whoever their favorite team is, their military, in the hands of and for the profit of George Bush & Company and Corporate America, is going to be driving helpless Fallujan women and babies into the desert and then slaughtering their husbands, fathers and brothers. (To liberate them, says Mr. Allawi.) The incongruity of the two pictures is simply mind-jarring.


And so right now, tonight, I'm angry about this tailgate party. I'm angry at myself for feeling obliged to join, to be a part of a party while our troops (who I am supposed to support!) are slaughtering innocent people and destroying the futures of hundreds of thousands whom they will leave homeless and maimed and orphaned. The family is sure not going to want me to come around spoiling the party by being glum or reminding anybody of Iraq. I'm angry with us all for being privileged Americans, privileged in large part by virtue of controlling the oil interests of and able to not give a thought to those women and babies and doomed men in Falluja. And right now, tonight, I'm angry with myself for not paying attention sooner to the direction my country was always headed. And tonight I'm angry with the situation - that I couldn't have done anything to stop the juggernaut if I had been paying attention. And tonight I'm angry with the world that it could be this way. Maybe I'm just tired.


I write this blog because I, like others, try to keep the truth behind the lies and the stories that don't get enough (or any) media attention circulating, so that at least the truth doesn't die. But I'm not sure what good the truth is if people don't want to know it. I know it's all a game - a hideous game - and there's something larger than all of this that really matters. But knowing that doesn't make it any easier to live in the game.


And, I know none of this is anything new. It's the human dilemma. And sometimes I rise above it (or shut it out). But tonight, I still feel some shock at the rapidity with which the Bush Kingdom is spraying out its full measure of venom on its own people and the people of the world, in the frenzied wake of its "mandate" - spending its "political capital" with the manic drive that characterizes its will to devour and destroy - and I feel horror, shame and great sorrow at the offer it has placed on Falluja's beseiged people: let your women and babies flee; we are coming to crush you.

All Falluja posts.