Robert C. Koehler
"Everything feels obscene," a friend said seven years ago, when we carpet-bombed
Is it still going on? Well, yeah, with a grinding pointlessness that's not worth talking about or even debating anymore. The smorgasbord of justifications has been permanently shut down: the 9/11 tie-in, the WMD, "another
So I find myself witnessing the seven-year anniversary in a state of private grief, chewing bitterly on the limits of politics. Whatever slow, cautious change President Obama believes in at the deepest level of his political soul, he can only attempt to conjure it out of politics as usual.
I fear that what the future requires isn't to be found there, and that shaking our fists and demanding change -- peace -- from it, or from politicians caught up in it, by, for instance, marching and protesting on the anniversaries of bad wars, will not bring about the changes I hope to see in my lifetime. I say this not to devalue protest or the antiwar movement, which over the course of the last hundred years has grown into a permanent cultural presence.
Indeed, seven years ago, when millions of people around the world took to the streets in protest of the
"Never before in the history of the world," he said, "has there been a global, visible, public, viable, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war."
For a vibrant moment I believed that a tide of outrage, a global tsunami of compassion, could check an empire and shut down a war. If enough people made their voices heard, we could dig down past the fear and moral relativism that turns love of country into hatred of a designated enemy -- that is to say, patriotism -- and uproot war itself.
Seven years into the
The wars continue and the debate over them, as refereed by the mainstream media, is as narrow and shallow as ever. The defense budget is still the overstuffed goose of the military-industrial complex. And, domestically, crime and punishment thrive, feeding the prison-industrial complex.
And the withdrawal of the
No wonder, as
Was Muller's "other superpower" an illusion? Has it been defeated by burnout and despair? Is the marriage of the military-industrial-media complex to the evangelical Christian right too momentous and entrenched a force ever to displace? This is a fighting force, lavishly financed, disciplined by fear, unencumbered by rationality, oblivious to the negative consequences of its actions, and prepared to go to any length, it seems, to maintain and further its power.
Disarming and redirecting this force, which draws from the patriarchal certainty that shaped the great civilizations of the past (
The other superpower, the citizens of a world in constant transformation, ever striving to build a more just and far-reaching peace, is alive, radiant, and quietly creating the future with countless initiatives to calm the heart of violence. The anniversary of this reckless war pierces me, but I stand committed to the creation of a world where the next one is not an option.
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(C) 2010 Robert C. Koehler