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Planet Peace?
by Ken Krayeske
Hartford, CT
To obtain two gallons of water, would you A) walk five miles to a shared, central well knowing that you have to carry it home five miles, or B) drive 15 minutes to a store knowing that buying gas finances a death machine that will kill someone you don't know 2,000 miles away by the time you get home?
In Iraq and many other places on this planet, Option A is it. In the United States, we could choose A, but most would consider you insane for doing so.
But you can't remain sane and consider the consequences of Option B every time you partake in that process. My friend from South Africa says Americans are not forced to live the way we do. Americans dwell in a consumer paradise, he says, you don't need the car, but he acknowledges it makes life easier. Decisions, decisions.
Two years into the invasion in Iraq, if you believe the polls, every other American considers the war a mistake. Yet those who harbor these misgivings don't seem willing to take the action necessary to stop this madness.
Sadly, an end to the war on terror is years away. I am resigned to the reality that neither the Democrats nor the fragmented American anti-war movement can curtail the Bush administration before 2008.
How long before a cohesive organization of millions produces viable leadership to forge a path to justice and peace? I'm not holding my breath. But, for laughs, let's make it a 10-year goal of 40-Year Plan.
In the immediate darkness, wrestling with individual powerlessness and groping for community, I find inspiration in writers like Arundhati Roy of India. She outlines our hypocrisy crisply:
"It is mendacious to make moral distinctions between the unspeakable brutality of terrorism and the indiscriminate carnage of war and occupation. We cannot support one and condemn the other.
"The real tragedy is that most people in the world are trapped between the horror of a putative peace and the terror of war. Those are the two sheers cliffs we are hemmed in by. The question is: How do we climb out of this crevasse?
"For those who are materially well-off, but morally uncomfortable, the first question you must ask yourself is do you really want to climb out of it? How far are you prepared to go? Has the crevasse become too comfortable?
"If you really want to climb out, there is good news and bad news.
"The good news is that the advance party began the climb some time ago. They're already half way up. Thousands of activists across the world have been hard at work preparing footholds and securing the ropes to make it easier for the rest of us. There isn't only one path up. There are hundreds of ways of doing it. There are hundreds of battles being fought around the world that need your skills, your mind, your resources. No battle is irrelevant. No victory too small.
"The bad news is that colorful demonstrations·are not enough. There have to be targeted acts of real civil disobedience with read consequences. Maybe we can't flip a switch and conjure up a revolution. But there are several things we could do. For example, you could make a list of corporations who have profited from the invasion of Iraq and boycott them, occupy their offices and force them out of business. Why not?"
The boycott still works. Recetnly, Taco Bell succumbed to a four-year long boycott engineered by the south Florida's Coalition of Immokalee Workers (http://www.ciw-online.org/news.html). Taco Bell agreed to pay a penny surcharge per pound of tomatoes to improve wages.
Martin Luther King, Jr.'s final speech, in Memphis, TN, April 3, 1968, when he said he had been to the mountaintop, encouraged people to use their dollar power to right the wrongs done to them, to not participate in their own oppression.
That challenge - to determine how we cause our own suffering and to work together to stop it - still stands.
3/16/05
U.S. soldiers and Iraqi national guards at the scene where a suicide bomber blew himself inside a funeral tent killing three people and wounding 38 others, in Baghdad on 19 February 2005.
Alli Abbas / Getty Images Ê