Train Lit

My friend Kara lent me her copy of Barbara Kingsolver's High Tide in Tucson. It's a collection of essays about all kinds of stuff. I've been reading it on the train to and from home and work. Yesterday morning one of the essays was too provocative to read standing up. I scrambled for an empty seat.

Here's the passage. She's talking about the Gulf War in early nineties.

"If we felt disturbed by the idea of pulverizing civilizations as the best way to settle our differences--or had trouble explining that to our kids as adult behavior--we weren't talking about it. [...] If democracy were really an issue we considered when going into that war, Iraq might have come out a nose ahead, Kuwait being a monarchy in which women held rights approximately equal to those of livestock. [...] but the level of discourse allowed on this subject was "We're gonna kick butt." A shadow of doubt was viewed as treason."

That last part sounds like our foreign and domestic policies. So what exactly is the discourse now? It's certainly more complex than "let's kick butt." But we're not allowed to see caskets of fallen soldiers and we're not allowed to see pictures of massacred Iraquis, their orphaned children huddled against strangers's legs. Bush recently linked the insurgency to the media's coverage of the "negative" aspects of the War in Iraq. Excuse me--the situation in Iraq. Slowly articles have been appearing analyzing whether or not the situation is actually the eruption of civil war. Questions have been asked, but the public remains inactive, waiting for change.

How mundane my commute was yesterday morning. I should've been in D.C. painting scowling words on my body, ripping apart notions that we have advanced and that waiting will bring change.