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(The Latest Word provides Sandy's latest observations about folk music and other topics. The main Latest Word page contains a list of additional installments.) BEING RIGHT AND DOING WRONG On a tombstone in a small New England churchyard is engraved the following epitaph:
Here lie the bones
of Solomon Gray, The horrible events of September 11 and the awful and seemingly inexorable erosion of our collective peace of mind and sense of safety over the past weeks have no doubt set most if not all of us thinking about war and peace, freedom, vigilance, and, above all, right and wrong. So it should come as no surprise that I've been doing my fair share of thinking (at the expense of writing, working, and other productive things). And I have come to the conclusion that we as a nation are right. We are right to feel outrage and desire retribution. We are right to long to put a face and finite borders on our enemy. We are right to ignore our ethnic differences in favor of national unity and solidarity. We are right in our instincts that say freedom and dignity for all people is good and oppression of anyone is bad. We are right in condemning systems of government that thrive on enforced ignorance and brutal oppression of women and ethnic groups other than the one in power, and right in deeming them inferior to our own for that reason. We are right to want to assist the oppressed in gaining or regaining the most basic human dignities and freedoms that have been denied them by cruel and unjust regimes. We are right to defend our nation and its people, and to prevent further atrocities from occurring. We are right in our ability to distinguish patriotism from terrorism, the acts of a government defending itself against those who have taken up arms against it from the acts of those who deliberately intend to take innocent civilian lives, and the justifiable attempts to repel and eliminate those who have actively tried to kill you (and destroy your nation) from the cowardly acts of those who aim to and do destroy not armies, but innocent shoppers, children, and workers. We are right to howl in protest when much of the world deems Israel's acts in shooting back at precisely those who are stoning, shooting, and bombing them more reprehensible than the acts of those who started and are still doing the stoning, shooting, and bombing. We are right to express our anger and frustration at those who equate the terrible accidental killings of innocents in the line of fire when that fire goes astray with the deliberate, cold-blooded, long-planned intentional destruction of at least 10 or 15 times as many of our own innocents and wreckage of the lives and livelihoods of thousands and thousands more. We are also right to insist that both Jews and Arab Palestinians must have homelands, that the original boundaries as of 1948 be reinstated; except that within the City of Jerusalem, the Old City (walled portion) should be under international jurisdiction and freely available to all who wish to tour, pray, or visit. We are right in insisting that the leaders of both sides adhere to the promises made by Arafat and Rabin at their historic summit, and that both leaders take full responsibility in controlling the actions of their countrymen. Yes, on reflection, there can be no doubt that we've got the right of way. Unfortunately, a huge chunk of the world doesn't see it that way, and that chunk of the world holds the balance between East and West, and between moderate regimes and fanatical theocracies. You see, the world loves an underdog and hopes the dark horse always wins. It's been that way since time immemorial. An entire religion claims to have gotten its start not from Abraham and Isaac, but from Abraham's cast-out firstborn Ishmael. Can anyone here cite a religion that uses the Bible and roots not for David but for Goliath? Thought not. Of course, we pulled for David because he was right and pure and a resourceful little guy, and against Goliath because he was a big, coarse, cruel bullying giant. Well, folks, it's time to wake up and smell the baklava: the Third World (and much of the Second) sees us and Israel not as David but as Goliath, and Palestine and all the Islamic jihad exponents as David. Palestinians have rocks (one of which, after all, killed Goliath), machine guns, rifles, Molotov cocktails and suicide bombs; thus they are the equivalent of David with a sling and a stone. Israel responds with armies and tanks; thus the are the bullying ogre Goliath. Jews were ousted from their homeland by Islamic regimes such as that of Saladin and had no homeland for thousands of years until dozens of the world's nations—large and small—gave them just a small slice of the Levant that included part of Judea and Samaria—and just oil-free desert and swamp land at that. By contrast, look at all the Middle Eastern and Central Asian nations that have sided with Palestine. Look at the map and globe and compare their sheer physical land mass; haul out the atlas and note their abundance of oil and minerals. Now, how many of those nations offered part of their land to indigenous Islamic and Christian Arabs living in Palestine? To assuage their collective guilt (and, I submit, to create a smoke screen to hide their original parsimony and lack of compassion for their brethren), they have chosen instead to lend their physical and fiscal support not to the Palestinians' health and welfare but to their desire to abolish Israel as a state and eliminate Jews from their lands. Look at the U.S., too—see how huge we are, both in area and population? See how abundant are our riches, both natural and created. It is not right or justifiable that the have-nots of the world (and the "haves" that espouse their cause) are jealous of us, jealous to the point of rage. Jealousy, as all monotheistic religions teach, is wrong. But it is explicable and understandable. Every act of defense we or Israel undertake is seen as the bullying of a Goliath; every act of aggressive terrorism against us is another stone from the sling of David—at least that's how much of the world sees it. Several hundred unintended victims of our own misguided bombs outweigh several thousand intended victims who died on September 11. Our arguments that the Taliban are deliberately placing innocent civilians in harm's way as human shields are falling on deaf ears—they reason that if we knew that "collateral damage" is foreseeable, our decision to proceed despite our knowledge of that rises to the level of wanton and willful disregard. Seems we are trying to use logic and reason upon inhabitants of a parallel universe. And we are. Yes, it is human, primally and innately human, to wish revenge and retaliation on those who wrong us. Terrorism is evil and must be stopped, no matter where it happens to be. Terrorism is a cancer—but it is not a neatly encapsulated tumor to be excised: it is a spreading, creeping, metastasizing mass that needs to be eliminated practically one cell at a time. Thus a "war on terrorism" is a handy, catchy phrase, but it is meaningless. For to wage a true war on terrorism means we must forever be prepared to eradicate it wherever and whenever it pops up; and make no mistake about it, pop up it will. It will continue to do so as long as there are some nations blessed with abundance while others are disadvantaged. Moreover, true peace on earth ceased to exist when the first nations drew their first borders. Are we prepared to continuously keep a bubbling pot from boiling over, to wield our "chemotherapy" and "radiation" (figurative, I hope) to control renegade cells that would destroy our body politic? Do we have the patience, the stamina, and the stomach to do so? If the answer is yes, then we will forever be at some kind of war—just like most of the rest of the world always has been. If no, we will lose. Period. Charles Krauthammer of Time magazine, a man with whom I almost never agree, made a case this past week for us to wage all-out war on all nations that harbor terrorists, war on a scale that has not been waged by Americans since World War II—and civilian casualties be damned. I found much of his column to be diametrically opposed to all I have been taught. But he is right when he states that we cannot wait for things to get back to normal—we are flying blind as to any new definition of what "normal" is. He warns that this war—if we choose to wage it—may take decades. Yes, we have the right of way. But in defending it the way we have been, we may very well be going about it all wrong. Will we as a society and a nation end up a collective Solomon Gray? Think about it. In closing, I reflect on the way I felt 10 years ago, when our first missiles fell on Iraq. As much as I detested Saddam Hussein (and still do), I had the sinking feeling that no matter how the Gulf War turned out, no good would ultimately come of it. Sadly, history may have proven me right. Our involvement in Desert Storm (and its precursor, Desert Shield) was the straw that broke Osama's camel's back. How I long to be proven wrong now! Main Page • Additional Installments • Contact Sandy Copyright © 2000, 2001, 2002, Sandy Andina, All Rights Reserved |
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