This is the first diary I've written.
I am an American citizen from upstate New York. I am a writer. I am also a high school student; I'll be applying to Cornell University on Christmas Eve and hope to study international relations. I am seventeen years old. In other words, I have no memory or experience of the world beyond home from before the time of the present administration. I don't know what, if anything, that means, but either way, I think my particular sliver of our generation has a unique point of view: the advent of our worldly awareness came no sooner or later than September of 2001.
I don't apply ideological, political or minority labels to myself. I believe every choice must be the lesser of two evils. I believe it is possible to end the cycle of war, peace and revolution. I believe it is worth the fidelity of a lifetime to achieve that. I know that others have tried and failed for five thousand years, and I have no reason to believe that I am better than them. But I believe that this is beside the point.
So in other words, I'm exactly the kind of idealist that a lot of people expect from someone my age. Because these beliefs have survived a fair few trials - personal and intellectual - I have no reason to believe that I won't carry these beliefs into adulthood. I hope to be prepared for the point at which they cease to be seen as the symptoms of youth and innocence, and instead become the insignia of naivety and delusion.
It's dark here. The evening is so much better for writing. I should write about something. I was going to write something after the election. What an evening. So much sound and fury finally signifying something rather than nothing. (Yeah, takes a lot of creativity to remix Shakespeare, don't it.) But I missed the window. That spirit will probably come back in the new year, and methinks Speaker Pelosi's first hundred hours will get the heart beating on its own. But not yet. We're stuck with sin, tragedy and Dennis Prager's theobibliophobia for one more month - one more eclipsed Christmas, and maybe the next one will be different, yeah?
So here's the thing that really kinda pissed me off like nothing else.
I don't usually participate in blogging - though I read about a dozen on a daily basis - but from time to time, I've talked, or rather written, to people who think that the bodies of enemy Muslim casualties should be buried with raw pig intestines. These are the same ones who think that people like us are treasonous for suggesting that captured "terrorists" should be given "rights," as if the Geneva Conventions were unaffordable luxuries. (They even have an acronym: AmINO. "American in name only.") These are the ones who compare the volume of violence in Baghdad to the crime rate in Philadelphia, and the psychological abuse of unconvicted prisoners at Abu Ghraib to fraternity hazing. They would say that this kind of thing is harmless - just guys under stress blowing off some steam, and after all, nobody got hurt, right? This is war, guys. Gotta take the good with the bad, stay focused, keep at it, stay the course and be patient, and one day we're gonna win.... as if anyone who's coached a high-school football team can turn this around and vindicate the half-million ghosts left behind by this absurd, surreal, flawed, corrupt, unforgivable...
Sick. It makes me sick. What else can I say? I'm sickened. I've been sick for a long time now. I've studied world history, American government and macroeconomics in college-level courses. I know Orwell, Voltaire and Jefferson. I've sat here, transfixed, reading news and blogs on a daily basis for half a decade. But in ten or twenty years, when my child sees the same things that I see, and she asks me how these things can be, why they are done, I have no idea what I'll say to her.
Can someone tell me how to get through these people's thick-headed noncognitivism and explain to them that this is how it starts? That when our enemies seduce the people whose support they need by telling them that Americans are heartless, amoral, arrogant gluttons, then maybe one of the first things we need to do is make sure not to offer any evidence that those things are true? That we're supposed to be the better people, not to show the ones who have already sworn to fight us, but to show the next generation, the children, who maybe won't swear that oath if we don't bomb their houses, rape their sisters and shoot their families, regardless of what's been done to ours? That winning is not the goal and losing is not the worst-case scenario, that they are meaningless in the face of the choice between taking life or saving it?
It has to end. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet. All I can do now is ask these people to take a good, long look at the face of the kid chasing the Army truck for a single bottle of water, maybe to keep his family alive one more day, only to see it smashed on the road in front of him by a laughing American GI.
Go on, look at him.
Now watch that video again. Sixty seconds. Watch it real close. 'Cause right there - there! - in a moment, a minute of your time, by the miracle of digital technology and the quiet omnipotence of the Internet, you have witnessed the creation of an enemy of the United States of America.
Anyway. Hello. I'd like to share my thoughts here from time to time, and I hope someone finds them interesting or useful to peruse.