The bombings in Spain revolt me...as, I think, they must revolt you.
There is something in the fact that neighbors and bystanders brought blankets and quilts to cover the wounded and the dead that is strikingly human and sad...
as if the instinct to protect and cover, which came too late in Madrid, transformed itself into protection from the prying eyes and cameras of the world, and highlighted the fact that cameras and media coverage are, since 9/11, irrevocably part of the strategy of the terrorist attack...
How do we respond to this?
In some ways, I think that we in the Industrial West are in mass denial about what terrorism really means.
In particular, those of us born after the close of the second World War have been raised in a bubble of security and prosperity that does not afford us a stand point from which to calibrate our stance vis a vis the phenomenon of the terrorist attack. Simply put, even if the implications of 9/11 imply a fundamental change in how we do things, in how we build and maintain our societies, in how we relate to the World, there is also an enormous inertial pull to simply return to the status quo as if nothing has happened.
I would compare this amnesia to the founding amnesiac events of our era, the Allied bombing campaigns that closed the second World War, culminating in the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In fact, the core of our current coalition, the English speaking industrialized West, directly and deliberately targeted the civilians and cities of our enemies and murdered hundreds of thousands of them without the least regard for their lives, the "rules of war" or human decency.
Now in Manhattan and Madrid, we see for the first time irrefutable examples of this strategy being used against "us" on a scale impossible to ignore. And yet, when the tide of media coverage turns...ignore it we will.
Personally, this sickens me in a visceral way that surprises...because I am familiar with the Chomsky / Sontag perspective: that these attacks are on some fundamental level a wake up call to we over-protected Westerners who have lived lives of luxury purchased with sweat shop labor, Bhopal incidents, and our own governments' support of corrupt and authoritarian regimes.
But this perspective does not answer the fundamental question I have following incidents like the one in Spain. If politics is essentially answering the question "where do I stand?"....well....where do we stand? And how do we answer the questions these bombings and attacks raise on more than a surface level?
Solidarity, as it was once formulated, had a benevolent and essentially paternalistic stance. Those in the "First World" reached out and "gave" their solidarity to "Third World" brothers and sisters.
Times have changed. It seems to me that President Bush, in his efforts to demonize and vilify our "enemies", has created a dangerous equation in which we are asked to look out from our "homeland" and fight evil, and yet have no obligation ourselves to do anything good or to reach out beyond our shores.
This paradigm plays directly into the strategy of terror.
I would argue that it is time for a new solidarity movement. One that is truly mature in how it understands our global interdependence. It is only by focusing on how we can do things together globally...from a stand point of equality and cooperation...that we will build a world that marginalizes both the hegemonic power of the West and the destabilizing fanaticism that has grown to oppose it.
This work is overdue..and it will happen at exactly the point where environmentalism and economic justice interact.
For me, this is the stand point: building a coalition with our brothers and sisters around the world to protect the earth and to grow an economy that benefits all of us together. With justice and self-determination for all.
In effect, I am saying that a Green / Solidarity politics is the only positive response to both terrorism and the abuse of power on the part of our governments and corporations. It is an attempt to build a lasting "good" to counter two evils.
On some level, this works from the kernal of the "dream" of Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy...our dream deferred. We need a two-way peace corps. We need to begin to philosophise a global citizenship with rights and responsibilities.
It will be ironic and sad, if the the Libery Tower to be built where the World Trade Center towers once stood comes to mean the liberty and prosperity of we Americans alone. The building of a tower echoing the Statue of Liberty belies the grim prospect that the Statue of Liberty itself may not live to see it's two hundreth anniversery. It is too easy and obvious a target...and yet that pales next to the fact almost 3000 of our fellow Americans and now 200 Spaniards are with us no more. To honor those we have lost, we need to make sure that the values that the Statue of Liberty represents never die.
We won't do that with buildings...or with "wars against evil"...
the only way to do that is to resurrect the idealism of King and Kennedy and build a new and lasting monument...a safer, more just, greener earth for all of our children. We cannot do this alone. We cannot do this in the isolation of our wealth and priveledge.
To cite W.H. Auden's famous poem..
we must love one another or die.