High Tide in Tucson_ Essays From Now or Never - Barbara Kingsolver [91]
I left, drove down into the innocent palm-shaded condominiums of Green Valley, and then, unexpectedly, headed up the other side of the valley into the mountains. When I reached the plateau of junipers and oaks I pulled off the road, hiked into the woods, and sat for a long time on a boulder in the middle of a creek. Water flowed away from me on either side. A canopy of sycamore leaves whispered above my head, while they waited for night, the close of one more day in which the world did not end.
In a poem called “Trinity,” Sy Margaret Baldwin explained why she would never go down to the site of the first atomic-bomb explosion, which is opened to the public every year:
…I would come face to face with my sorrow, I
would feel hope slipping from me and be afraid
the changed earth would turn over and speak
the truth to the thin black ribbons of my ribs.
JABBERWOCKY
Once upon a time, a passing stranger sent me into exile. I was downtown in front of the Federal Building with a small crowd assembled to protest war in the Persian Gulf; he was in a black Ford pickup. As the truck roared by he leaned most of his upper body out the window to give me a better view of his finger, and he screamed, “Hey, bitch, love it or leave it!”
So I left.
He wasn’t the first to give me that instruction; I’ve heard it since I was a nineteen-year-old in a scary barbershop haircut. Now I was thirty-four, mother of a child, with a decent reputation and pretty good hair. Why start listening now? I can only say he was finally one too many. I was on the verge of having a special kind of nervous breakdown, in which a person stalks through a Kmart parking lot ripping yellow ribbons off car antennas.
I realize that would have been abridging other people’s right to free expression. What was driving me crazy was that very term “right to free expression,” and how it was being applied in a nation at war. We were supposed to behave as though we had refrigerators for brains. Open, shove in a slab of baloney, close, stay cool. No questions. Our leaders told us this was a surgical war. Very clean. The language of the event was a perfect construct of nonmeaning. “Delivering the ordnance,” they called it on the nightly news, which sounds nearly friendly…“Why, here is your ordnance, friends, just sign on the line.” “Deliver the ordnance” means “Drop the bomb.”
But we bought the goods, or we kept our mouths shut. If we felt disturbed by the idea of pulverizing civilizations as the best way to settle our differences—or had trouble explaining that to our kids as adult behavior—we weren’t talking about it. Typically, if I raised the debate, I was advised that if I liked Saddam so much I could go live in Iraq. As a matter of fact I didn’t like Saddam, or the government of Kuwait. The two countries appeared practically indistinguishable; I doubt if many Americans could have guessed, a few years earlier (as we flooded Iraq with military aid), which one would turn out to be the Evil Empire, and which would require us to rush to its defense in the name of democracy. If democracy were really an issue we considered when going into that war, Iraq might have come out a nose ahead, Kuwait being a monarchy in which women held rights approximately equal to those of livestock. (Since the war, women’s status in Kuwait has actually declined.) But the level of discourse allowed on this subject was “We’re gonna kick butt.” A shadow of doubt was viewed as treason.
I’m lucky enough to have a job that will follow me anywhere, so I left. I could contemplate from a distance these words on patriotism, written by the wise Garry Wills: “Love of one’s country should be like love of one’s spouse—a give-and-take criticism and affection. Although it is hoped one prefers one’s spouse to other people…one does not prove that one