Louise M. Bishop
1820 Olive Street
Eugene, OR 97401-3856
Spring 2003

A MOTHER'S WORRY

"Mom, make them stop! We have to do something!"

It's Saturday, March 29, and my eighteen-year-old daughter, a college student in New York home in Eugene for spring break, has seen the war supporters marching down Willamette Street on this, the last day of her visit home.

"Don't they know what the American army is doing? Don't they know that people are dying? That Americans are killing people in this war? We should run one of them over so that they'd know! Mom! We have to do something!"

Emotions are running high right now: it's like nothing I've seen before. In my daughter's adopted city–yes, the city of the twin towers–over a quarter of a million people marched against the war last weekend. People who bus, walk, or subway in lower Manhattan remember that horror daily–one of my New York friends reminds me that, for weeks, all you could smell were rotting corpses on the air--and still they do not support a war.

I tell my daughter that we can see whether the Eugene marchers have a permit but, as long as they do, they have the right to express their opinion as much as anti-war protesters do. She sputters, she weeps, she wails in her room for people killed with bombs, desperate at the idea that anyone could support such carnage. I check the paper and see an announcement for the rally. The pro-war folks had gotten their permit. There was nothing we could do. We went to the Kiva to get her some Eugene treats to share in New York, two "No War" buttons our only protest.

Today, Sunday morning, I put my daughter on her plane back to New York, then read my e-mail. There, at the top of the MSNBC Webpage a banner flashes: "Is the War in Iraq the Beginning of Armageddon? Join the Left Behind Prophecy Club Now!" I click, and up comes http://secure.agoramedia.com/index_leftbehind.html, an astonishing (and obviously very wealthy) Web enterprise, run by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins. They are the "best-selling authors of the Left Behind series." I learn that they, "along with noted Bible historian and end times analyst Mark Hitchcock have teamed up to lead the Left Behind Prophecy Club. As news breaks and world-changing events unfold, you will be the first to receive in-depth analysis and interpretation from LaHaye and Hitchcock." Subscribing to the Website promises "weekly analysis of world events in light of end-time prophecy, your questions answered by LaHaye, Jenkins and Hitchcock, exclusive message boards," and most importantly "free Left Behind Illumina to the first 20,000 subscribers! (A $20 value) (Offer available to U.S. Residents only)."

I shuddered at the sight. I study the Middle Ages and have some acquaintance with the power of apocalyptic themes. Here, the drama of apocalypse was being used to sell videos. . .and to sell war. I was astonished at, among other things, the site's crass commercialism. Fear combined with self-righteousness may pander to people's lowest instincts but the combination sells well enough to afford a flashing banner on a major media player's Website. I could wish the Website a Saturday Night Live parody–how could someone, especially a Christian, take such idiocy seriously?–yet I've seen around me, in cynically simplistic statements about "evil," the signs of desperation that turn into demagoguery and violence, patterned into a blindness that makes invisible a young girl blown to bits by an American bomb in a Baghdad marketplace.

I turn to the newspaper. I read one of the Register-Guard's front-page stories, "Protesters try to counter city's anti-war leaning." The accompanying photo, jubilant in its red-white-blue motif, caught me in a memory: of visiting my father's naval reserve unit at Floyd Bennett field in Brooklyn, New York. He was a machinist and navigator, a World War II veteran. He continued after the war as a "Weekend Warrior," a reservist in the Navy (squadron VP8-32) to augment his blue-collar machinist's salary for our one-income, middle class, suburban New Jersey family. On this day, a kind of "Family Day," probably following his return after having been called up for the Cuban missile crisis, shiny planes ranged across the enormous airfield. The cavernous airplane hangars were festooned with red-white-and-blue bunting. I ate my first cheeseburger that day (I was eight years old) and my heart still starts, my voice still catches as I feel, and try to describe, the mixture of pride and awe that filled me as I stood in that patriotic scene forty-one years ago, saluting a flag and my father.

My father and I argued a lot during the Vietnam era. I'd had epiphanies. I'd watched Wayne Morse on Dick Cavett (channel 7) explaining why he'd voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. I was a teenager, ripe for rebellion anyway, but I began to see complex ways to think about our country. I'd also seen Joan Baez on the Merv Griffin show (channel 5) explaining her pacifist philosophy. When another guest, Telly Savalas, star of "Kojak," challenged Baez by asking her, "What would you do if an army regular with a rifle broke down your door and menaced you?" she answered, "I'd make him a cup of tea." This was another profound moment in my education brought about, interestingly enough, by a talk show.

1970 was a turning point: Kent State woke up a lot of folks, while it also probably contributed to hardened attitudes. One day, after church, I saw my father chuckling and nodding with some other men as they waited for their wives on a fine spring day. I walked over and asked my father was he was talking about. As the other men dispersed, he explained that some "war protester" had been pushed out of a window by some "fellows". My father and his friends were talking about what a shame it was that the "fellows" had been charged with a crime since, "Well, you know."

"No, Dad, I don't know, what?"

"Well, you know, those war protesters, you know, he was, well. . ."

Even as my father was trying to put his sentence together, I watched his face change, the realization of "freedom of speech" as a sacred tenet suddenly complicating the righteous attitude he and his friends had wrapped themselves in just a few minutes ago. I persisted, asking him why the war protester should have been pushed out a window. He couldn't answer and, because it was Sunday, we let it drop.

Now it's another Sunday, thirty-three years later. In the local newspaper story about the pro-war rally, I read the comments of war supporter and Eugene parader Dave Stoy, 72 (my father would have been 89 this year).

He said the anti-war protesters don't have the stomach for reality. They don't realize the number of people who die in automobiles or are murdered in this country.
When they start calling the veterans "baby killers," it's extremely irksome, he said.
"It makes you want to get out of the car and punch a girl," he said.

I am stunned, although I shouldn't be. Definitions of masculinity that depend on violence for their meaning tend to meet the crushing weight of "feminine" sympathy with more violence. Nor is it unusual for that violence to be directed against women. Womenspace and SASS are just two agencies here in Eugene that try to deal with this violence in our community, and they're understaffed and overworked. The seemingly endemic nature of masculine violence reveals a lot about our neighborhoods, and American culture, just as Mr. Stoy's comments reveal more than he might have intended.

Counselors try to teach abusive men that their impulse towards violence sets up a vicious cycle, and that answering violence with violence leads to self-destruction. But for me, reading Mr. Stoy's comment, I fear for my passionate, articulate daughter who feels powerless to stop the ravages of a war that she won't allow to be anything but altogether completely real and immediate for her. She won't cheer this war, supported by oil interests, as a kind of football game. She won't forget that the gas masks being used by the Iraqi forces are made in America, owing to a time (not that long ago) when Saddam Hussein, like Manuel Noriega (remember him?) was our friend. She's too thoughtful and aware to have the surety of a "divine plan" to fall back on, nor has she the hardened attitudes that would allow her to pretend that bombs don't blow up people, including the brown people in Iraq. And she, youth that she is, has a consuming desire for justice. She believes that one way to cure a society sickened with violence and undermined by jingoistic pride is a communitarian spirit that takes seriously the oppression that racism and sexual violence perpetrate under the name of patriotism. Mr. Stoy's comments, like his support for Dick Cheney's war, too clearly shows the dangers someone like my daughter faces in our increasingly violent and fractured society. It is not a society that can do a blessed thing to "save" Iraq.

May God help us all.