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NumbJuly 09, 2007
This morning I was reading an article about three U.S. soldiers, two men and one woman, who managed to survive Iraq and come home. I started crying when I got to that. The speaker was Michael Goss. It's not that I haven't read and heard stories like these three, and not just about this war. When I was a young antiwar activist almost forty years ago, it was the stories of the returning servicemen that gave me reasons for opposing that war went beyond politics. Numb. You have to go numb to tolerate the intolerable. When the intolerable is unfixable, how else do you survive? The soldiers who manage to not see who they're killing and what they're destroying and what it's doing to their heads -- they're numb. We here at home, watching it on the TV or reading about it in the papers or online -- we get numb. Even if we're speaking and organizing against the war, we're numb most of the time, and it's a blessing too, because if we felt 24/7 the kind of experiences that these three people describe, we wouldn't be able to string five coherent words together or put one foot in front of the other. If we had to really feel the lives behind the statistics we read every day -- not just for a few moments but for hours at a time -- we'd go numb. Sometimes I go numb just trying to keep my own life on track; my life's pretty good, but I know that if I let too much reality in, I'd be babbling by the side of the road. Going numb looks like the only alternative.
In war the intolerable and the unthinkable become normal. What you have to do to survive to the end of the tour, the end of the day -- the next few minutes. "Normal" is like an anesthetic. It numbs you. If everyone else is doing it, it's OK. Coming "home" is like an alcoholic or an addict quitting cold turkey -- you give up the anesthetic and you're face-to-face with all the experiences and terrors it was shielding you from. I can't stop crying. (Don't worry, I'll get over it; I have to get back to work.) What just hit me is that most of us in the U.S. of A. don't have to come back, or get sober. We can go about our lives in the belly of this beast that's snuffing out lives and dreams and consciences all over the world (including here in the big belly) and never admit that what we call "normal" is intolerable and unsustainable. We have the luxury of staying numb.
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