3:08 p.m. - Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2003
the war is here
The anti-war protest on saturday was a rad place to be. There were so many people there I was totally stoked - 25,000 plus in Montreal! Fuck yeah.
Props to North America, maybe we all get it more than I once feared...will it make a difference?
Well, considering that U.N. inspectors publicly stating that this whole economist magazing, threat of Saddam Hussein's 'arsenal of weapons of mass destruction', bullshit that we've been buying for the last year is total hype, that there are no fucking weapons anywhere in that country that pose any sort of a threat to global safety, and decrying the American agenda of invasion, hasn't made a difference in their bravado, its hard to imagine anything really will at this point.
I sat around smoking a joint the other night with Jules, and we were talking about history and politics, etc, like we always do, and in the midst of what started out as a sort of chill,smoked down academic convo, I burst into tears that took even me by surprise.
I simply couldn't remain removed and unemotional when i made the observation that I am currently witnessing the end of everything Canada has always meant to me, and everyone else i know, for my whole entire life.
I'm a Trudeau era baby, and this shit that's going down right now is knocking me on my ass. We will join an aggressive military coalition and invade a veritably defenseless country, with or WITHOUT U.N. approval? MacCullum, you fuck, what did you just say? This is not us. This is not a comfortable fit. We don't do shit like that, yo.
We broker peace. We create landmine treaties. We celebrate diversity. We conserve nature...don't we? Well, we did. Sort of, even that was a bit of a myth, and now it seems, what we mostly do is bend over and take American missiles up the ass so as to more conveniently launch them at entire civilizations of people who are now being held hostage by imminent death and sickness and war on a mass scale. Bravo Canada.
Did the Republican administration ever even care if we believed the hussein boogey man theory? Did they ever even care if the U.N. supported this invasion? What exactly is the purpose of an international community council like the U.N. anyway, in light of this atrocious disrespect for everything the institution was meant to signify? This is a lie. Its always been a lie. This war is a lie. Its about oil, and its about money.
Meanwhile millions of innocent people sit powerless in Iraq right now, and wait. Someone is in love, like I am, and she will fall asleep holding her partner every night, and weep, and she will have nightmares that she knows will come true, and she will wake up every morning in a panic, because sometime in February her whole world will fall apart, and she will most likely loose that love. Mothers will loose their babies, kids like us will loose their parents. They know this like we know this. And all they can do is wait.
Even if Saddam Hussein did have the weapons the U.S. is claiming he has, even if he did have the fucking power, do you think those people chose him? Who's paying for this lie? Not Saddam, man.
I want to vomit just thinking about what that must be like. I feel it in my own life on some small, undefined scale...will terrorism strike here? Will war? Will I loose Jules, my friends, my dog, my dad? I can't even imagine how bad it would feel without the fragile blessing of the vague and undefined. At least when you don't know for sure you can put it out of your mind for an hour, a day...at least you can laugh and hope. Without hope...my God.
As it is 3/4 of the children in that country are born dead, or so badly mutated and sickened by radiation that their life is nothing but a five year death sentence. Already life in Iraq is as close to a nightmare as i can imagine, from our last 'war'against the country - if you can call it that, as many of their soldiers, forced to fight agaist their will, exausted, poorly armed, and poorly fed, threw down their arms to the U.S during it. But our soldiers buried uranium bullets in their soil, and planted the seeds for generations of sickness and death in their blood anyway. No one is calling this a nuclear war, but believe me, when shit like that goes down, when radiation seeps into every crevice of a nation's life, its nuclear fucking war. Its the sickest of devistations.
I've read peoples' journals these last few days, and I've read their upper middle class, self involved inner dialogue about whether or not they felt up to the 'social obligation' of going to that protest. I love these people for many reasons, but their illusions about what is happening in this world leave me stunned and suffocated. This is no longer a trite choice.
I too doubt the protest's potential for actual influence, as I witness what we've come to call the democratic system begin to fade into an eerie echo of the Weimar era. Its not funny though. And the best efforts civil society can muster right now are not only not meaningless, they've never fucking been more important. This shit is not about boyfriends, or waking up early on a Saturday, or whether or not you dig it che style kids, its about fucking war, get it? Its about the psychological torture of every last civillian of Iraq, as they are held hostage to an imminent and wholely destructive war, who like it or not, you share some thread of humanity and consciousness with. Its about trying to stop the spill rather than trying to clean it up. Human lives are like dominos, and don't think just because North America has had the luxury of isolationist politics up to now, it means we are somehow beyond war, here, now, us, you. Jesus, do you think we're more than mortal or some shit?
Most of this world has been living with misery longer than you've been alive, and they deal with issues larger than getting on line, or getting high, or getting off, they deal with the loss of life and dignity every fucking day, and they understand more about survival and rising up to challenge before the age of nine than you ever will. They are stronger than you. And most of this world isn't going to lay down for another imperialist grab, another mighty, ignoble war. Bet on it, idle children of plenty, unprecedented does not mean impossible. You may find yourself hostages of war yourself sometime sooner than you ever imagined. And you may wish when that time comes that people cared about it. That there were voices to join in unison with your own. You may all have to realize real soon the diffence between cynicism and suffering.
You think you all suffer because you're emotionally and morally bankrupt, because our generation doesn't believe, can't trust, is vaguely disgusted by consumption, but yet at the same time wholely immersed in it. Our existential anxiety somehow passes for pain, but the more I learn about the rest of this planet the more I realize its nothing but fashion. I'm sorry if this sounds harsh, but I'm directing my scorn at myself as well. There's no rope left to hold onto, get it? Its not a matter of whim, or style, or appetite any more. Your decisions are going to have to start coming from a realer place, real fucking soon, because the shit is about to hit the fan.
So, anyway, I hope you all took the time to spend an hour or two of your life out in the street on saturday, just to let the trecherous know that you may not have the power yet, but you do have a soul and a voice. Those are the first things they try to take away, yo. Please don't forget it.
