It is a time of freedom and fear, of Gaia and of borders, of many paths and the widening of a universal toll road, emptying country and swelling cities, of the public bought into privacy and the privacy of the public sold into invisible data banks and knowing algorithms. It is the time of the warrior's peace and the miser's charity, when the planting of a seed is an act of conscientious objection.

These are the times when maps fade and direction is lost. Forwards is backwards now, so we glance sideways at the strange lands through which we are all passing, knowing for certain only that our destination has disappeared. We are unready to meet these times, but we proceed nonetheless, adapting as we wander, reshaping the Earth with every tread.

Behind us we have left the old times, the standard times, the high times. Welcome to the irregular times.


 
Mother Davis pokes her own belly button as she asks herself,

When should a peacenik refrain from saying, "I told you so?" In Iraq, the situation appears to be much as the anti-war protesters predicted. Almost no one suggested that America would lose the war, but we did predict that America would lose the peace. Now, with suicide bombings and daily attacks along with gigantic protests of Iraqis demanding that American troops leave their country, the Bush Administration claim of "liberation" is shown to be a farce. Americans are refusing to allow United Nations weapons inspectors to have anything like the unfettered access to Iraq that months ago Bush cited as a valid provocation for war. The American military, with its hundreds of thousands of soldiers, has failed to find any of the "weapons of mass destruction" that they said made war against Iraq a necessary action. Even Donald Rumsfeld has admitted that it is likely that Saddam Hussein destroyed any such weapons before the war began, before Bush's deadline.

We could spend a lot of time pointing out that all the arguments George W. Bush used to urge America to invade Iraq have proved to be groundless. Still, before we do so, we should ask ourselves: What would be the point?

The invasion of Iraq is over, a done deal. It was wrong, way wrong, and historians will point out the hollow propaganda and loose logic the Bush Administration used to push America into war. We cannot undo the invasion.

What we can do is to prevent further ridiculousness by preparing for the future. We all know that as long as Bush is in the White House, more wars will be in the planning. For George W. Bush, W. stands irrevocably for war.

It is time for us to rededicate ourselves to the anti-war movement, a movement which exists whenver general conditions threaten war, as they still do. We need to look to the future instead of carping on a past that is by definition not up for debate.

This morning, I put a new bumpersticker on my car, and prepared to drive the streets with my little billboard shining for peace.

Looking forward even more to the chance to vote against war in 2004,
Mother Davis

Posted by Katherine Davis at 3:16 PM. # (permalink)  




Return to the Irregular Times Main Page

Read our Blog Archives