[Mb-civic] A new revolution declaring war on war

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A new revolution declaring war on war
AL MARTINEZ

November 7, 2005  |  Los  Angeles Times

In every phase of my life, war has been a factor.  

It has haunted my childhood, all of my middle years and now follows me  into 
the twilight time.

We acquiesce to the wars by obediently waving  flags, marching to stirring 
battle hymns, building monuments and cheering like  fools at a high school 
soccer game. I think back not just to those major or  semi-major conflicts, one of 
which I've fought in, but to all the "lesser"  military adventures we have 
incorporated into our policies of persuasion and  subjugation.

History has rolled quickly past war's grief, mourning only  for a moment, and 
has blurred the horror into fading images through a rear-view  mirror. What's 
important is not that we cried but that we won.

And here  we are again, trapped in the repetitions, doomed by the lessons 
never learned,  fighting whispers and shadows for only a vague notion of  purpose.

Thousands of lives, ours and theirs, lost, billions of dollars,  ours, spent 
and no way to damp the terrible fires that burn in our furnaces of  rage.

We can argue God and governments until the words become meaningless  and 
curse the inhumanity or our enemies even as we torture and humiliate those  in our 
custody, both sides victims of the ironies we have helped to  create.

Salvation in more recent times has rested not on the vagaries of  leadership 
but on the will of the people, the few who raise fists of protest and  are 
followed by the many. Cindy Sheehan, demanding to know why her son died,  leaving 
the question to bleed in the very air of D.C., receiving no answer,  joined 
by thousands.

We saw the peace marches emerge from the passion of  students in the 1960s, 
defying in the streets those who threw young lives into a  war so like the one 
we fight today, a war lacking outlines and honesty, a war  without end.

Burdened finally by the souls of the young dying in Vietnam,  we joined the 
students in the street, ended the war and chased a president of  the United 
States out of the Oval Office and into the shadows of  yesterday.

Last week, we saw the peace marchers again, faintly  reminiscent of those 
days of rage that shook the world 40 years ago, but this  time it isn't only the 
young who are launching the protests.

I sense that  a good many of the marchers, maybe most, are people like 
Sheehan and people like  me and people like you who have lived through wars, who 
have fought in wars, who  have lost a part of us in wars and who are damned tired 
of wars. This is, as it  should be, a people's revolution, including 
teenagers and retirees, an army  forged not by the need to win but the need to lose 
the curse that has caused us  to repeat the sins of human conflict from one 
generation to the  other.

The war in Iraq won't be won, not in the traditional sense of  conquest and 
occupation. We know that now. Polls track a dawning realization  across the 
political spectrum that this is a war without victory. George W. Bush  called for 
unity in crisis, which he never truly received, but may be seeing his  wish 
granted in the streets of protest, with a unity of purpose.

Politics  aren't the only reason the march has been joined by the right as 
well as the  left. We have discovered in the battle's heat, observed from afar, 
that when the  drums of patriotism are only faintly heard and explosions are 
the only reality,  Republicans bleed as easily as Democrats, and all fall as 
one in the mutuality  of their deaths.

Most of us exist in the isolation of our own lives and  cross borders of 
empathy with effort. We find it difficult to feel the deep and  abiding sorrow 
that another feels when war reaches out to individual homes and  individual 
hearts in Boston and Oklahoma City and Denver and Phoenix and  Portland and Los 
Angeles.

We will have evolved beyond who we are once we  are able to absorb the grief 
that others feel when the military man at the door  brings news from the front 
lines that no one wants to hear. We will know pain  beyond the emptiness of 
rhetoric that comes from the mouths of politicians. We  will ache in ways that 
we never thought we could.

I'm hopeful that what  we are seeing more of — a growing distaste for the 
killing fields — will become  a revolution for peace that is long overdue. If 
not, the battles will drag on,  engendering more rage and hatred, laying the 
foundation for new animosities and  solving nothing.

Years from now, as we weigh war's lies and motives, we  will come to realize 
that, paraphrasing Pogo, we have found the weapons of mass  destruction and 
they are us.
_____________
Al Martinez's column appears Mondays and Fridays.  He can be reached at 
_al.martinez at latimes.com_ (mailto:al.martinez at latimes.com) .

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