Column Remember when discussion of public policies was mark of a great
democracy?
By JOAN CHITTISTER
Im still whispering, Is
it all right to talk yet? Is it all right to say something different? Is it all
right to wonder out loud whats really going on? Can we discuss yet
whether this is really the United States or did we come down somewhere else in
the last five months?
Because if its not all right to talk about the ways things
really are after the fall of the twin towers their implications and their
dangers Im really worried. In fact, in many ways Im more worried
about not being able to talk about it than I am about al-Qaida.
And theres plenty of reason to fear. In the last five
months, in the name of unity and democracy, we have named an act of Congress
that enlarges police powers to invade personal privacy without benefit of
warrant The Patriotism Act. We have stripped people of legal rights
and constitutional protections. We have held people without charge,
incommunicado, and without benefit of legal counsel. We have fought a
war where the prisoners are not POWs and so devoid of international
protection but can be tried in military tribunals. We have turned our national
budget into a military honey pot.
I have no problem with the fact that we have been destroying rogue
military targets designed to undermine the governments of the world, starting
with our own. I do have a problem with the fact that this war is being fought
under wraps. We see nothing of its effects. We hear nothing but the cheering.
We are all in political burkas. In Vietnam, they inflated the number of
casualties and conquests to affect victory. In the Gulf War they at least
showed us the corpses of fleeing Iraqi soldiers in burned-out jeeps in the
searing desert. In Afghanistan they are showing us nothing at all except the
hole in the middle of our own New York. Its a clever ploy. The heart
cant possibly grieve what it cannot see being done in its name.
The news blackout is almost complete in this most technological
age in history: The war zone is a map with stars on it. At most, it
is dim and far away pictures of rough and barren mountains in an age when we
can see the stripes on a mans tie from outer space. Journalists are kept
at bay. News reports are military public relations releases. The
great democratic society where information and debate, discussion and mutual
consent are the air an informed people breathe has been brought to a silent and
shrouded end.
It is a war without victims. There are no refugee camps. There is
no official estimate of the number of Afghan civilians whose lives have been
ended, one way or another, by the collapse of their country and its non-stop
pummeling, although over 4,000 civilian casualties have been documented by
agencies as reputable as Pax Christi, the Catholic peace group, and The
New York Times.
Oh, yes, every once in a while a picture seeps through the net: an
Afghan baby eating a mud pie made of grass and a trace of wheat
flour because of the food shortage, a child whose leg has been amputated
by a land mine, a village in rubble. But not much and not often.
After months of non-stop bombing we are apparently, somehow,
waging a war without fatalities, without damage. And were doing it at
great cost. Were doing it with no public discussion of its internal
implications for either country and countries around the globe other than the
fact that we were hit and so we hit them back. Worse, anyone who
tries to discuss other dimensions of the situation is called
unpatriotic. Writers lose their jobs. Peace groups who plead for
less barbaric means of conflict resolution in a world dangerous to itself are
ridiculed. A terrible silence reigns. A fearful silence reigns.
A number of columns have been written across the country on the
war. Much has been said about air force clones and special forces.
A great deal has been said about our national resolve. But those
may not be either the real issues or the real questions that underlie this
festering conflict.
The fact is that the basic question the question we may find
ourselves wishing years from now we had attended to in the midst of this is
what exactly is true patriotism? And if it has anything to do with
the public examination of public policies carried out in our names, as the
great debates of the early republic imply, do we allow it anymore? Or are we
reduced simply to flags and tears and cheering? To deferent acceptance and huge
national debt for weapons that didnt do a thing to save us in the first
place and which have not managed to find the man we attacked Afghanistan to
get?
They tell us that Osama Bin Laden took down the World Trade
Center, destroyed our innocence and killed our innocent, left us numb,
vulnerable and in shock. But thats not all he did. It may not even be the
worst he did.
If its not necessary, not even socially acceptable, to
consider the context in which he was able to do it, if its not all right
to be self-critical as well as angry, if there is no mourning for the loss of
their civilian victims as well as our own, if there is no airing of the global
implications of pre-emptive attacks on other sovereign nations, if the news
media can be gagged so easily, then he took down a lot more than the World
Trade Center. He took down what makes America America and all the resolve in
the world may not be able to save it.
Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister, author and lecturer, lives in
Erie, Pa.
National Catholic Reporter, March 1,
2002
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