Life as a Washingtonian has not, for decades, demanded that you choose which side of a set of baracades you wanted to fight on, but that's in the air this morning. The weather and the protesters make indifference difficult. You are forced to consider, trapped in your plastic/aluminium wheeled box listening to war on every radio station. Do you hate the protesters for lengthening your morning? Are you small enough to think only of your own convenience while thousands of miles away people are fleeing a city for a war begun in your name?
I tell myself that as the first shots have been fired, it has become time to make this brutally short and over. I remind myself that the reasons media discuss openly for war are seldom the real ones. History demonstrates this amply so I shouldn't be upset. People are tools and pawns and war comes because those in power find utility in it. It is the mark of the wise not to turn their consciences over to the State. I tell myself all these things, and somehow it doesn't help.
Today will be another work day. I will go home tonight and evade the news. And spring will come and my daughter will grow. And no answer I find for what I could have done to prevent a war will satisfy me.
Posted by karen at March 20, 2003 12:00 AM