The grass grows green, and in the light of the full moon the warm winds of a coming summer caress the leaves of the trees, sushing newborns to sleep, their young parents to dream, and the old to drowse. We hold our loved ones close, our minds filled with domestic tribulations, the laundry, dirty dishes, or a stroller needing repair. Our homes are quiet and perhaps it is only the soft tock of a mantlepiece clock which tells us time flows, as does our hopes that we will continue to prosper, that our young will grow stronger and smarter, and our lives as families, as neighbourhoods, and yes, as a nation, mature and wisen with each day's sunrise.
But there is a war on.
In our names, as we sleep with our children pressed near, in another land, far away both in mind and physically, a terror is being consumated. Men and women plucked from our very neighbourhoods are busy with murder. They are blowing up homes, bombing neighbourhoods, shooting parents and torturing innocents. All in our name, all paid with our money, and all ordered by a military commanded by our politicans. Our basic humanity, from which springs the very love we have for each other here at home, demands that we ask why. We hear it implore us in our hearts every time we hear of another checkpoint "mistake", see another family's children crouched at soldiers' boots in the glare of a flashlight, weeping, their pretty dresses splashed with the blood of their parents.
All of this spares us the chore of thinking out an answer, personal to ourselves, to the question: why. We fear to think too deeply, for those who think deeply, feel deeply. And for those who feel deeply, there is the pain of failing to act, of covering our hearts and shielding our eyes with the hypocrisy of conformity. For some of us, it is too much to expect us to figure out the world as it is, to figure where our place is, and what we owe to and should expect from others. It is hard enough just within the confines of our families, where we may find personal wars being waged. To understand our place as a country in this world may be beyond our ken, to understand what we owe to the world, and what we ought to expect from the world may require a level of thought and concern most us may not be capable of assuming. To those who shrink from such a task, -if only because the bomb that explodes in a home in Fallujah, the bullet that kills a child in Tikrit, or the tank that crushes a family sedan in Baghdad, -if only because all of these has your name on it as an American, you are compelled to answer as if you were standing before your very God and the victims of your weapons.
We need not answer that question. We can cast it out of our minds as if it were nothing more than a passing pang of pain, a fleeting discomfort that casts a momentary shadow over our own homes, our children, and the happiness we find here, an unwelcome intrusion. Some of us have ready-made answers as an antidote: the War on Terror, 9/11, "better there than here", and for a smaller few, because we resent the shadows, the threat they may pose to our life and loved ones, we hate "them", and actually revel in the scenes of murder and mayhem we rarely see on our television sets. Others would have you think the very question itself was unamerican, was itself a stab in the back of our kin fighting in Iraq, and all discussion of the merits of this war as treason.
Why this war? To answer with thoughtless slogans, which, when challenged, dissolve into the thin air from they came only implicates the speaker in contempt for reason, for the truth, thus furthering the agenda of the enemies of reason and truth. Yet far worse than the war itself, far worse than the partisans, the shouting boosters with their flags and anthems, far worse than the careerists in the media who betray a tradition of truth-telling, it is the silence. If you listen carefully to your television or your radio, or read your newspaper, you can barely hear it. It lies in the questions not asked, the pictures not shown, and the liars not challenged. It blooms and holds hostage the tongues of many who know better, in our Senate, in our media, and in our churches. Political fear is its name, and Martin Luther King once quoted the Rabbi of Berlin who, in relation to the horrors of Nazi Germany during his time, said that even those terrible things paled in terms of shame and disgust to those who stood mute. "A great people which had created a great civilization had become a nation of silent onlookers. They remained silent in the face of hate, in the face of brutality, and in the face of mass murder."
Abu Ghraib stands at the epitome of what America has become. It is nothing but silence that prevents the persecution of those ultimately responsible, as it is silence that allows it to continue to this very day. And it will be silence that will permit America to lose its founding principles, and founder on the rocks of militarism and authoritarianism. Abu Ghraib is a slope made slippery with the blood of innocents. It is time for us to break the silence, protest the war and the warmongers, lest America lose her footing and slide into a shadow far deeper and wider than any terrorist could cast. That shadow will darken all of us, in our homes, our neighbourhoods, and indeed, the very futures of our children.