A new revolution declaring war on war

IN every phase of my life, war has been a factor.

It has haunted my childhood, all of my middle years and now follows me into the twilight time.

We acquiesce to the wars by obediently waving flags, marching to stirring battle hymns, building monuments and cheering like fools at a high school soccer game. I think back not just to those major or semi-major conflicts, one of which I’ve fought in, but to all the “lesser” military adventures we have incorporated into our policies of persuasion and subjugation.

History has rolled quickly past war’s grief, mourning only for a moment, and has blurred the horror into fading images through a rear-view mirror. What’s important is not that we cried but that we won.

And here we are again, trapped in the repetitions, doomed by the lessons never learned, fighting whispers and shadows for only a vague notion of purpose.

Thousands of lives, ours and theirs, lost, billions of dollars, ours, spent and no way to damp the terrible fires that burn in our furnaces of rage.

We can argue God and governments until the words become meaningless and curse the inhumanity or our enemies even as we torture and humiliate those in our custody, both sides victims of the ironies we have helped to create.

Salvation in more recent times has rested not on the vagaries of leadership but on the will of the people, the few who raise fists of protest and are followed by the many. Cindy Sheehan, demanding to know why her son died, leaving the question to bleed in the very air of D.C., receiving no answer, joined by thousands.

We saw the peace marches emerge from the passion of students in the 1960s, defying in the streets those who threw young lives into a war so like the one we fight today, a war lacking outlines and honesty, a war without end.

Burdened finally by the souls of the young dying in Vietnam, we joined the students in the street, ended the war and chased a president of the United States out of the Oval Office and into the shadows of yesterday.

Last week, we saw the peace marchers again, faintly reminiscent of those days of rage that shook the world 40 years ago, but this time it isn’t only the young who are launching the protests.

I sense that a good many of the marchers, maybe most, are people like Sheehan and people like me and people like you who have lived through wars, who have fought in wars, who have lost a part of us in wars and who are damned tired of wars. This is, as it should be, a people’s revolution, including teenagers and retirees, an army forged not by the need to win but the need to lose the curse that has caused us to repeat the sins of human conflict from one generation to the other.

The war in Iraq won’t be won, not in the traditional sense of conquest and occupation. We know that now. Polls track a dawning realization across the political spectrum that this is a war without victory. George W. Bush called for unity in crisis, which he never truly received, but may be seeing his wish granted in the streets of protest, with a unity of purpose.

Politics aren’t the only reason the march has been joined by the right as well as the left. We have discovered in the battle’s heat, observed from afar, that when the drums of patriotism are only faintly heard and explosions are the only reality, Republicans bleed as easily as Democrats, and all fall as one in the mutuality of their deaths.

Most of us exist in the isolation of our own lives and cross borders of empathy with effort. We find it difficult to feel the deep and abiding sorrow that another feels when war reaches out to individual homes and individual hearts in Boston and Oklahoma City and Denver and Phoenix and Portland and Los Angeles.

We will have evolved beyond who we are once we are able to absorb the grief that others feel when the military man at the door brings news from the front lines that no one wants to hear. We will know pain beyond the emptiness of rhetoric that comes from the mouths of politicians. We will ache in ways that we never thought we could.

I’m hopeful that what we are seeing more of -- a growing distaste for the killing fields -- will become a revolution for peace that is long overdue. If not, the battles will drag on, engendering more rage and hatred, laying the foundation for new animosities and solving nothing.

Years from now, as we weigh war’s lies and motives, we will come to realize that, paraphrasing Pogo, we have found the weapons of mass destruction and they are us.