:: Monday 17 September 01
I tried to stay away from the computer and TV this weekend, and bolster my personal sanity by reimmersing in mundane physical life. I tried to distance myself temporarily from the vehemence and anger and furious debate that's raging around the 'net by considering it all clinically, as case studies of how people react under stress. But of course it's all still there waiting; we're in this for the long haul, it seems, and the political and rhetorical fires are only just starting to heat up.
I've found myself thinking about the Vietnam War quite a lot, oddly. This morning, in the NY Times Magazine special edition, I read this, in an account of a man's van trip across country with a group of strangers trying to get to New York:
"Inevitably, the men talked about themselves a little. I gathered that they liked their lives, their work. The oldest had been involved in bailing people out in Vietnam. They didn’t want, any of them, to go back to that America of turmoil. "
I had an unpleasant phone conversation this morning with my old friend M., who'd been on his annual fishing trip up north for the past week and a half, and who'd returned full of "Blow 'em back to the Stone Age, kill 'em all and let god sort 'em out" rhetoric. M. was a Marine in Vietnam; he had a bad war, damn near got killed, came back home, threw away his Purple Heart and joined the Vietnam Vets Against the War. He was vehement, back then, in his opposition to militarism as a solution to global problems. But talking to him today was like the awful fights I used to have with my dad over the dinner table in 1969.
It's too hard for me to try to think clearly about what might come next, in terms of military actions, reprisals, alliances and enmities, long-term geopolitical consequences. Too much is just unclear right now. But what does seem clear is that beneath the hopeful language of unity and common purpose, there are some sharp ideological and philosophical divides that have already started to emerge in public forums, that have the potential to fracture friendships and polarize us.
God, do I remember what it was like living during Vietnam; "that America of turmoil," indeed. I'm not saying Can't we all just get along? These divisions and disagreements exist, they're there, and they need to be talked out. And that's a good thing, of course--free speech, open exchange of ideas, all that. But man, what an exhausting prospect. Been there, done that, don't need another t-shirt.
(And of course it may be I'm just a wee bit stressed out still, and should quit the hell reading all the threads on metafilter.)
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"Our vocation is not a sphinx's riddle, which we must solve in one guess or else perish. Some people find, in the end, that their paradoxical vocation is to go through life guessing wrong. It takes them a long time to find out that they are happier that way."
--Thomas Merton