Monday, October 21, 2002

Why Do We Oppose the War? One of my sons writes "Your blog today made me stop for a minute and think about why exactly it is that I oppose the war against Iraq...The most basic reason I oppose the war is because I think it is a fundamental and potentially devastating misunderstanding of what the real problems in the world are right now.  Bush is going to war because he doesn't get it."   He then asked about my gut reaction, my first reason for opposing the war.  He suggested that based on my last post, it was empathy for those who would suffer most.   I think empathy is important, but it is not the most important thing.  The bedrock of my political feeling is a fundamental belief in equality.  I enjoy personal achievement, awards, recognition as much as the next person, but when it comes to living I feel a basic equality must exist--between white and non-white, between men and women, between the West and the third world.  My empathy and outrage about Iraq grows from the outrageous double standards Bush, our government, and much of our society exhibits.  Crime and punishment, including death, is largely a matter of wealth and class, not equality before the law.  We tolerate outrageous victimization of the lowest paid workers and immigrants, with little difference in the public attitude today from that of Dickensian England, where landowners and industrialists thought the poor deserved to die in the streets.  Think of the 11 migrant workers recently found dead in a box car.  Our government chooses force and military domination to approach the world, rather than reconciliation and negotiation.  I don’t accept living in a militarized society.  It is antithetical to freedom, privacy and self-reliance.   Last night at our monthly reunion meeting (an affinity group described here) we discussed the differences between our opposition to the Vietnam war and the movement today, particularly the role of the radical fringe groups.  This is the same theme that I have been writing about lately.  The catalyst was a senior at Oberlin, one of our children, home on a short break.  He asked what kind of activist he could be, when some radical groups at Oberlin had no appeal to him and his friends.  He asked how his experiences were different than our own 30 years ago.  Two weeks ago, he and about 40 kids from Oberlin took a bus overnight to New York, for the Oct. 6trh demonstration.   The best answer growing out of our discussion, I felt, was that we originally thought the U.S. actions in Vietnam were an aberration, a violation of the values of democracy, equality, anti-colonialism and anti-fascism that our country had fought for in World War II.  We were against the war in Vietnam because it was a violation of everything the U.S. stood for.  Since then we have learned despite the ideals, which our country still represents, there have always been powerful ruling classes in our country that opposed and trampled on those ideals, or that controlled our government for their own non-democratic ends.   But, I felt this idea of the promise of our country really gave us a place to stand.  Our struggle for peace, equality, and justice is no different than the struggle of the abolitionists in the North, and the slaves in the South, who saw slavery was an evil not to be tolerated.  Our commitment to changing U.S. policy is not a revolution, but a demand to return to our own revolutionary roots.  The ideas of justice, liberty, equality, and democracy still resonate powerfully throughout the world, and the true crime of our leaders is how they have turned these things on their head, so that war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.   So I answer my son’s question as to why I furiously oppose the war in Iraq by saying I am an American, a patriot, and I defend the ideals that our country truly represents. 11:02:12 PM   comment []

© Copyright 2002 Toby Sackton. Last update: 12/26/2002; 9:30:55 PM.