Posts Tagged ‘Iraq’
I woke up this morning with a word. Well, actually, a complete sentence and an unsettled feeling. Maybe it’s because I’ve been reading about rams, canals,goats and horns, that I woke up with my heart racing, my blood pumping and a word: Amazon is the Anti-Christ.
Crazy, huh?
Now for you scientific folks who look to Stephen Hawking for the definitive word on God, you might want to hang tight. I’m not a linear thinker. I’m the sort that has to go around my elbow to get to my mouth but, eventually, I get there.
Like a lot of you, I’ve been thinking a lot about this notion that somehow or another after all that bloodshed, we’ve brought freedom to Iraq. Media has such a nifty way of tying everything up and bundling it off. We say things like “War Over” or “Troops Come Home” and the bulk of Americans go hop-skipping along, off to do their part for freedom’s sake — shopping.
Remember way back when, back when Destre, Carson and Grant’s daddy was an Army Ranger and not a tombstone in Arlington, when we were told the best thing we could do on behalf of our country was to get back to our normal routine of shopping?
We walked away, confused, with a shake of our heads and muttering “numbskull” and “dip-sh*t” and for about six weeks we collectively grieved.
But then oh-what’s his face came out with that patriotic Red, White and Blue song of his about putting a “boot up you arse” and everybody started making trash heaps out of all their Dixie Chick CDs, stomping on them with boots and running over them with John Deere tractors.
Nobody ever hears from the Dixie Chicks anymore. We taught those girls not to mess with the good ole U.S. of A, didn’t we?
We like the mythology of war — this notion that America represents the collective conscience of the world and that anytime we do something in the name of Democracy it’s for your own good, even when that something means blood runs in your streets and shopping for a loaf of bread is a matter of life and death.
We really hate thinking about the reality of war. Nothing is more unsettling to us than to be out in public, say like at the shopping mall over Labor Day weekend and seeing a young man with a titantium rod for a leg. If it weren’t for that distant look in his eyes, you might think he’d injured it in a car wreck. But that looking-off-over-yonder gaze, well, everybody knows what that means — Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. P.T.S.D.
There’s a bunch of Americans who don’t believe in P.T.S.D. They think it’s just one more way to bilk the American taxpayer because, yeah, that’s the first thing on the mind of a boy or girl who has just seen their buddies blown to Kingdom Come– How can I spend the rest of my life living on the public dole?
Exhale.
I have to do that a lot, otherwise, my heart starts racing again like it was when I woke with a start this morning thinking that Amazon is the Anti-Christ.
I did a brief little poll yesterday. I asked people if they read or cared about the book reviews on Amazon. Collectively everybody said that yeah, they read them and yeah, they mattered. One fellow even said when he didn’t pay attention to the reviews and bought the book anyway, he was usually sorry he had.
Now I know when I asked that question folks were probably thinking that the reason I asked it is because I care about who is reading my reviews over at Amazon and if the reviews are hurting or helping the sales of my books.
But I wasn’t thinking that at all.
I was thinking about freedom and what it means when we as a nation go put our boot up the arse of another nation in order that they, too, can have a democracy like us, so that everyone in their country can be reading Jonathan Franzen’s latest epic. Because it seems to me, in my convoluted way of thinking about these matters, that freedom has nothing to do with the individual or his or her pursuit of happiness. It’s all about product placement.
It’s all about Wall Street.
We tell ourseleves that we are a free nation but then we folo our peeps to see what the next hot item is so that we can all collectively run out enmasse to buy it. We wouldn’t want to be left out. That would be weird. To not own one of what everybody else owns.
Because shopping is the one true thing that binds us together. Not God. But Amazon.
Men and women have fought and died on battlefields all over the world so that you and I can can have freedom. (It occurs to me that the people who actually practice freedom are those who volunteer to protect it, given that only one-half of one percent of the nation’s population serves in the military. The cost of bearing the burden of democracy – government by majority rule – falls on the shoulders of a minority.)
These few suffer and die for the collective good of us all, for freedom’s sake.
Freedom to read what everyone tells us to read. Freedom to listen to the same damn Lady Gaga song that everyone else in the nation is listening to. Freedom to wear the same Nikes and North Face that everyone else is wearing. Freedom to live in the gated community where everybody else we want to emulate lives. Freedom to attend the same church that all the other people just like us attends. Freedom to watch Eat, Pray and Love, because, Lord knows, watching somebody else do it is so much easier than praciticing it ourselves.
I was just thinking that freedom ain’t what it used to be, back before Wall Street figured out that technology is a great way to manipulate the masses without us even being aware of it.
See?
Amazon really is the Anti-Christ.
(Editor’s Note: The following is a piece that I wrote for Newsweek in 2005. I thought its message timely and important as we bring combat troops home from Iraq)
After her own father died in Vietnam, writer Karen Spears Zacharias learned what it was like to be a survivor of war. Zacharias detailed her own experience in a new family memoir, “After the Flag has been Folded: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Vietnam and the Mother Who Held the Family Together” (William Morrow Co.). She has also taken on a freelance counseling effort, reaching out to the children of today’s fallen servicemen and women with sympathetic letters, late-night phone calls and quiet visits to their homes. They see her as someone who truly understands–just another kid who lost her father in a faraway war. At NEWSWEEK’s request, Zacharias has written them an open letter.
Dear Sons & Daughters of Today’s Fallen:
I read your names: Zane, Tegan, Kadence, Brandon, and Esetavave. And the names of your surviving parents: Sally, Andrea, Linda, Ron, and Latisha.
Then I figure your age, to see if you are yet old enough to remember the parent you lost to war. Or if you are too young to have any memories, like so many of my friends who lost their fathers in the Vietnam War.
I was 9, old enough to have lots of good memories. Such as the way Daddy gently tossed the baseball across home plate so my older brother Frankie could swing for a base hit. Or the time he brought us kids silky soft rabbits for Easter and laughed off Mama’s protestations that our yard would soon be littered with critters. After supper I would sit on Daddy’s lap and rub the palm of my hands across the coarse stubble on his face. It’s in the quiet after supper that I recall my father best. I miss sitting on the front porch and drinking a cup of coffee, reminiscing with him about our family’s growing-up years.
We got word of Daddy’s death on a sun-scorched day in July 1966. We three kids-Frankie, 12, me, and Linda, 7-gathered around Mama, as she bent over the backend of the trailer tending to a bulldog pup.
Grandpa Harve, Mama’s stroke-disabled father, sat nearby in a lawn chair. A white-woven hat and green-lensed sunglasses shielded his eyes.
I don’t know if he was watching us or the military jeep headed up the entrance to Slaughters’ Trailer Court in Rogersville, Tenn.
I can remember endless details of that day, yet, trying with all my might, I still cannot recall the exact moment when the soldier told us that Daddy had been blown up in the battlefields of Vietnam. I hear with aching clarity the wails Frankie made as he punched the walls of that trailer and the sobs of my mama as she walked up and down the hallway, pleading, “Why me, God?”
You might be wondering the same thing: Why you? Why your parent? Why your family? It’s normal to ask, but, trust me, there isn’t an answer that will ease the ache in your gut. Or the anger and frustration that such a loss ignites. Mine was the first generation of children to have war blasted into the living room each night. And, like many of you, I lacked the tools to articulate the confusion I felt as I watched it unfold. So, I retreated to a place of woundedness and began to self-destruct. First out of fear, then anger, then sheer rebellion. At 17, desperate for male attention of any sort, I became pregnant and had an abortion. Frankie was just as confused. He tried to numb the hurt with alcohol then drugs. That only created more problems.
Once she was handed that flag Mama never spoke of Daddy. As a child I resented that. I needed to hear his name, Dave, the way I’d heard it every single day of my life until then. But I was afraid such talk would hurt Mama or Frankie or Linda. Decades passed before our family learned there was healing in talking. The friends I made at Sons & Daughters in Touch and the veterans I’ve befriended have encouraged me honor my father’s memory. They don’t ridicule my tears. They don’t prod me to find closure. I don’t miss my father less with each passing year, I’m simply more aware of all the life he’s missed. You don’t need closure.
You just need acceptance.
To find that you must remember your parent. The jokes they retold, the meals they savored, the way their arms felt upon your shoulders, or the way they smelled when they hugged you close. In other words, they way they loved and cherished you. Your parent died in an effort to bring freedom to others. Don’t misuse your own freedoms to self-destruct.
Honor James, Pamela, Orlando, Bennie, Michael-your mothers and fathers–with a life that will make them as proud of you as you are of them.
Ransom the sacred moments, so that your daddy or mama will be remembered as much for the way they lived as the way they died.
God bless you,
Karen
It’s fair week in Umatilla County. Shelby and Konnie were home over the weekend and we headed downtown on Saturday to take in the parade activities. I don’t know if the girls think it’s as much fun as it used to be, back when they could chase after the candy for their own selves and not for the kids sitting next to them. But even I got a tootsie roll tossed my way. I kept it, rather than sharing it with the girls. That’s the kind of mother I am — selfish with the tootsie rolls.
Joining us at the parade was a classmate of Konnie’s who has spent the last 8 years living in New York City. They have different kinds of parades in NYC. Instead of elaborate floats crafted from flowers, we have big rigs. Our rigs come in every size, shape and color. There are rigs from Wal-Mart, rigs from the Volunteer Fire Department with signs the read: In case of fire, write or call. We have Walchli rigs that haul their famous watermelons around the nation and rigs that haul musicians around the Inland Empire.
But, of course, everyone’s favorite rigs are the John Deere rigs. Brigades of John Deere are a common site around these parts. They come up over the horizon in billowy clouds of sand, flattening stalks of golden grain in their wake. If you ever get a chance to ride in the cab of a John Deere combine during harvest you better not pass it up.
Several years ago the Oregon Wheat League hired me to write a book in tribute to their 75th anniversary. I traveled around Oregon interviewing as many of the former presidents of the OWL as I could track down. I enjoyed hearing their stories in much the same fashion as I enjoy the stories of the veterans I know.
These farmers are veterans of hard times. They are survivors. They know how to live with and without, and to complain about it either way. Okay. That was meant to be a joke. They are some of the hardest workingest people you’ll ever meet.
I was thinking about all that and all those farmers I’ve interviewed over the years as those John Deere rigs came motoring up the street. Kids and adults alike stood, ooohhhing and aaaahhhhing.
Then I had this thought …
What if, instead of soldiers and humvees, we had a sent brigades of farmers and their John Deeres into Iraq? How differently would Iraq and its people look today had we contracted with the nation’s farm leagues, instead of with Blackwater and Haliburton?
There are plenty of different kinds of weapons we can use, if only we’d think of warring as something we do on behalf of others and not against them.
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