Despair and Hope

I started writing again today for the first time in a couple of months. It's funny how life feels less chaotic when I get my 25o words done (today it was actually 407 words). Makes me feel stronger. That sense of accomplishment is a great tonic.

I've been meaning to write about stuff from the Middle East, yet I've also needed time away from it all. Most of this last week I haven't even bothered to read through the newspapers as it's become so overwhelming. I feel such profound rage and grief. My godfather today said that 9/11 created a worse case scenario in the Arab World and I have to agree. And I keep thinking of Rashid Khalidi's words last May when people kept talking about the coming disaster and he replied that the disaster is already here.

So, Abu Ammar is dead. When I watched as the French guard brought out Arafat's casket draped with the Palestinian flag, it was like seeing the palpable reality that a Palestinian state is dead. I mean, I've known for a long time that it wasn't going to happen. But now I've seen it with my own eyes and a part of me feels empty.

Last April when I was in Jerusalem for the Sabeel conference, they moved the entire conference to Ramallah for one day so that Palestinians who were not allowed to travel to Jerusalem could attend. I didn't go as it was to be a 12 hour day, and I have to rest every couple of hours. When they came back, my friend R. said that they ended the day at the Muqata'a and met with Arafat. After speaking, he came and shook hands with each person and took pictures with anyone who wanted one. "I missed getting my picture taken with Arafat!!" I exclaimed. My friend tried to console me. "He'll be here when you come back," she said. I knew that wasn't true. He was ageing rapidly and if the Israelis didn't kill him, he would die of illness well before I ever made it back.

Of course, there has been the thousands of words devoted to assessing his "legacy." The tired ramblings about how he "walked away from peace" blah blah blah. It's a load of crap and it's frankly why I avoided the news. I couldn't bear to listen to the blatant lies about Camp David retold over and over again. That Barak offered Arafat "94%" of the West Bank and Gaza. The Israelis didn't offer anything to Arafat at Camp David and only afterward did they concoct the story about offering him "94%." (See Nigel Parry's piece at ei or Ali Abunimah's or this interview.)

Don't get me wrong. Arafat had plenty of faults. Would I have preferred he had insisted on non-violent means of resistence? Absolutely. But do I understand what makes resistence groups -- including the ANC under Nelson Mandela or the Native Americans -- resort to violence? Absolutely. And frankly, non-violence isn't exactly successful these days. China is still in Tibet, despite the amazing discipline and spiritual power of the Dalai Lama. Nothing seems successful these days.

I try not to lose hope, but today was hard. Hearing that Margaret Hassan is most likely murdered broke me. Reading Robert Fisk's article about her brought me to tears, and this afternoon when I saw the headline on Yahoo when I opened my browser, I sobbed. Fuck Donald Rumsfield with his "freedom is untidy." Fuck the bastards who killed her. Fuck Saddam Hussein for invading Kuwait back in 1990. Fuck the whole damned thing! I can't help but feel responsible as an American, yet I feel so damned helpless -- a feeling I've had for the last decade as Iraq suffered through sanctions (which Hassan witnessed kill a generation of Iraqis and who she helped as best she could through CARE) and now invasion and war and bombs and trigger-happy Marines and head-chopping religious nutcases.

My boyfriend recommended a BBC documentary that they have over at the Information Clearing House called "Mission Accomplished." I watched as the Marines who were being interviewed explained that if Iraq had a McDonalds, we'd never have invaded. "It had a McDonalds before 1990, you fuckers," I muttered to the screen. People don't understand. Iraq was the most secular, prosperous country in the Arab World before 1990. Men AND women attended university. Sipped coffee at cafes in Baghdad. It had the highest literacy rate in the Arab world. The University of Baghdad was the most prestigious medical school. But now women are afraid to leave their house unveiled. Hell, to leave their houses period. Children die from diseases that doctors had never seen in Iraq before 1990. "Did you ever think it would get this bad?" my godfather asked me last week.

But I try to focus on the fact that there are people like Margaret Hassan in the world. That even if such a beautiful person should die peacefully in bed rather than shot by some evil being who could not appreciate such beauty, I'm glad she was in Iraq for all those years. That there was someone there to bring hope during all the darkness that has befallen her adopted country.

“Do not say, ‘Sin is strong, impiety is strong, the bad environment is strong, and we are lonely and powerless, the bad environment will dampen us and keep our good endeavor from being filled.’ Flee from such despondency, my children! There is only one salvation for you: take yourself up, and make yourself responsible for all the sins of men. . .Whereas by shifting your own laziness and powerlessness onto others, you will end by sharing in Satan’s pride and murmuring against God. I think thus of Satan’s pride: it is difficult for us on earth to comprehend it, and therefore, how easy it is to fall into error and partake of it, thinking, moreover, that we are doing something great and beautiful. . . God took seeds from the other worlds and sowed them on this earth, and raised up his garden; and everything that could sprout sprouted, but it lives and grows only through its sense of being in touch with other mysterious worlds; if this sense is weakened or destroyed in you, that which has grown up in you dies.’” (from The Brothers Karamozov, Fyodor Dostoevsky, trans. Richard Pevear and Larrisa Volokhonsky, New York: Vintage Classics, 1990, 320.)

I think of my sister who works with little kids in the projects of Washington D.C. I think of the people with ISM or Christian Peacemakers. How these are the fruit of the seeds God planted. How if each of us truly took ourselves up and made ourselves responsible for the world -- even our own little world -- there would be far less suffering.

And that is why I must go to bed now. So that I can get up and write my 250 words tomorrow. My own way of taking myself up.

Though, I think I'm still going to delete the newspaper newsletters in my inbox.