The New Rambler

Gentle Readers,

The pieces I’m sending out now were written in the last couple of days, based on thoughts I’d been having now for weeks, or months, or years. As I write this preface now, I’m listening to NPR tell me that military strikes have begun against Afghanistan. I’m listening to a White House correspondent report that George Bush has noted, again, that these attacks are only one aspect of a multifaceted military strategy, and that some aspects of this strategy will, by necessity, be covert, and we will never know about them. I would like you, for a moment–particularly those of you who are older than I am, who have memories more direct than the accounts I have received from books–about the covert, secret military actions you know about. (Sometimes, I believe, these were called “police actions.”) I would like you to think about wars in the past, in which, theoretically, strikes were made only against military targets, and I would like you to think about collateral damage. I would like you to think about how you wage a war against an enemy you cannot see, whose whereabouts you do not know, and whom you have represented consistently not as a person or even a group of people but as a concept, an -ism. I would like you, if you can, to think of the number of American casualties in any recent war, and then I would like you to think if you can remember, or even find, the number of casualties on the other side. I have noted to many of you on many occasions that I do not really believe in moral progress. It seems to me that the aggregate level of human suffering has remained the same across the centuries. I still believe that. But I also believe that we are obliged to try, and I believe, more now than ever, that peace can never be achieved or kept through strength. Einstein, whom I believe said that first, concluded by noting that this peace “can only be achieved through understanding.” I think grass roots organizing promotes understanding, that reading promotes understanding, that singing promotes understanding, that loving–family and friend and neighbor and stranger alike–promotes understanding. I encourage you to continue with it all, and to preserve, for yourselves and those around you, those things which are good about civilization.

Shalom,
Laura