Since attending a local peace rally yesterday, I have a deep inside spot of anxiety.  I have wondered if I was getting ill or if something is wrong with one of my children.  I wonder if it broiled up because of an encounter with a young Marine at the rally.

 

And maybe this profound sense of anxiety is best summarized by images I carry now from yesterday's excursion.  

 

One followed another, they are intertwined in my timeline.  I begin with a conversation with Ron, a person I met 4 years ago when I took my first Tai Chi class.  There were several of us who would meet during the week and practice what we were learning. Ron met with us regularly, adding a male presence to an otherwise female one.  Before we had learned our entire form, Ron stopped coming.  He was diagnosed with cancer.  I have rarely seen him since.  I saw him this April, more than 3 years later at a peace and justice march in Atlanta. He is a quiet fellow, not given to much talk.  When I asked him last April why he marched his answer was this (loosely translated)  I demonstrate for peace, not so much as to change others but so that I myself will not be changed.

 

At this Peace Vigil I asked Ron how he is doing.  He informed me that all treatment for his cancer had been stopped. There is nothing else for now that they can do for his disease.  He said this gazing leveling at me.  I know that he comes each Friday, rain or shine and holds his sign for peace. I know that he is a veteran of the United States military forces. And then events propelled me onward.  

  A young Marine was talking to one of my friends. The casually dressed young man  was intense in stance.  He did not state exactly why he was there.  But the more he engaged with us in conversation, the more agitated he became. He would not touch our signs or our literature.  Hands up, no touch. He has been in Kuwait and will ship out to Iraq soon. I told him my husband was a Marine, Vietnam combat veteran who returned to America to find himself in a hospital bus with chain link fence around it to keep people from throwing projectiles into the windows.  That my husband fought for truth and honor and when he returned home he slowly began to understand that his government had him fighting for an entirely different agenda.  No, my husband doesn't come to peace vigils. But he is willing to risk his life and limb so I can.  Another young woman came up with a sign. She knew the young Marine and asked how he was. He said he was very uncomfortable. And he turned and walked off as fast as he could.

 

I have a son that age. I am married to man whose war experiences color every aspect of his life 38 years later.  I recognized that face, that expression. That walk.  The man was boiling inside, only lightly held together by his skin. The man was explosive.

 

Where did he go from there? What did he do? How did he resolve his feelings that wanted to leap out of him?  What does America look like to him?

 

C explained to me we should have been shaking his hand and thanking him. He is right. This young man is no older than my children, doing a time honored job for us.  

 

Only trouble is there is such a disconnect between the service with honor and the whole mid-east conflagration.

 

So...,  I am left feeling as if I have a stomach virus. Afraid. Afraid for our youth fighting. Afraid for us soft-bellied Americans. Afraid for my children and grand children.

 

The War of Terror.  It is working.  I am terrified. Only it is not of some foreigners coming to my land and bombing and poisoning me.  It is because we are going as foreigners to other lands and doing that to them.  Because my children don’t make enough money to support themselves.  Because America is becoming more dangerous everyday.  With the Federal Government disbanding more and more of what gives us security as a people and giving the responsibility back to the people and the states we become more and more a disorganized group of sectarian gangs.

 

One day will it be said of America that - no it is not civil war, not regions fighting against each other, but gang warfare in every street and town of America - as one general just explained the nature of Iraq's violence.

 

Why are we there?  Why are we fighting to control the oil underneath the soil of another people’s land? Why are we forcibly creating a base for ourselves so that we can fight wider wars in that territory?  Why are we starting wars?