LAYERS OF THE ONION

I watched a film entitled VOICES OF IRAQ in which an international agency supplied 150 video cameras to 150 people from all walks of life in Iraq in the summer of 2004. Much of the footage that resulted was in Bhagdad. Kids would be playing on the streets in their clean western clothes and a bomb would explode somewhere in the city. They didn't register with even a flinch, so accustomed to the event. By and large the film left the impression that the United States and her allies have saved their country, have restored basic services (water, sewage, electricity) and allowed children to return to their education. But the film also covered both southern and northern Irag which have distinctly different issues, both environmentally and ethnically.

I felt a heart connection to the families portrayed, and heard my own dogmatism echoing in my ears, about a topic I knew very little. My information comes from extremely limited input: U.S. media from the right and left wings. Yet I felt I needed to have a strong opinion. Beneath the media are hundreds of critical issues vying for solution in that area, one of the cradles of mankind. The war has evolved without my input; now Afghanistan and Iran heat up. And Pakistan, and then the chronic and acute battleground in Israel. Why do I feel I need to have an opinion on matters as obscure to me as astronomy or physics, and over which I have as little influence?

Peeling away media, emotional responses, and even history, what seems to be taking place on the planet is not dissimilar to what is taking place in my back yard right now. There are enormous forces at work, creating death and life, as the soil contracts and expands with the wildly swinging temperatures of spring, and the sun's increasing presence. Nonetheless, some things are emmerging: daffodil leaves, iris leaf tips, buds on trees, all slowly doing exactly as their natures' dictate. They have no resistance; it is their destiny. So too human life, growing, living, killin, dying, groping, responding to forces that are at once unconcious and superconcious. I am content that all is well in my yard; but my anxiety regarding humanity's evolution draws me to ideas and rhetoric far beyond my knowledge. I don't pontificate about nature's destruction in my compost, but man's destruction arouses my passions.

I am pondering this issue. Dare I let go of emotional involvement "over there?" Can I be remotely aware of half a million dead humans and not respond? What about gnawing guilt? I often consider the hundreds of thousands that died in the Middle Ages,or from the Mongols, and the hundreds of thousands of others that knew nothing about it, and couldn't have affected change if they did know about it. Is there blame here?

The sky is a lovely pale blue, and the day promises both sun and rain. Today I'm peeling off my international awareness, and my national awareness. I'm being a citizen of my yard, and my family. And I might be tomorrow too.