After largely ignoring politics since early in Clinton’s first term — you know, back when the worms had eaten into my brain and briefly made me a Republican — I tuned back in with a vengeance after 9/11. I was awakened in time to watch the second tower collapse, and my first thought, before learning that most folks had made it out, was something along the lines of, “Oh dear God, that was 20,000 people killed in a few seconds.” My second thought was, “There goes the Constitution.”
I had paid enough attention leading into the election to know that the Bush II administration was going to make the evils of the Reagan years look like children’s games. But hey, we lost the election, and there wasn’t much to do but wait for the next one. It wasn’t like there was much chance of anything happening that would make me vote Republican.
I wasn’t in favor of invading Afghanistan, but not because I didn’t think it was justified. The implausible claims by the Taliban that al Qaeda was operating independently and without official oversight were nonsense. And it’s not like I didn’t have hopes that the women of Afghanistan might end up better off with the Taliban out of the way. I just didn’t think we could win; no one else had, after all, and nations made of much sterner stuff than America had tried and failed many times before. How could Americans, who flinch at single-digit casualties, succeed where the British Empire and the Soviet Union had failed?
So I learned a new lesson: never underestimate the power of satellite-guided 20,000-pound bombs. Of course, by diverting everything to Iraq, we’ve lost most of what we gained since.
And Iraq — I had studied Saddam Hussein since well before the first gulf war, and I knew everything Bush was saying was utter horseshit. People who believed a Saddam-bin Laden connection were the height of ignorance then; the ones who still believe it are just fucking morons. I started to get really pissed as the Iraq misadventure got rolling, and I have been getting steadily angrier and angrier since. It keeps me up at night. It intrudes on my thoughts during the day.
It’s time to take a break.
As noted in a recent, brilliant diary on this site reccently, anger and hatred are like swallowing poison and hoping your enemy will die.
I’ve thought about that a lot in the past week. And it’s true. George Bush doesn’t know I hate him and wouldn’t care if he did. It’s me that hatred is consuming from the inside out. So I’m going to stop paying attention to politics for a while and focus on finding some kind of internal balance.
Truly, I don’t expect to be able to love this particular enemy. I find, quite seriously, the idea that George Bush has a human heart impossible to believe. Maybe he did, once. Maybe Ted Bundy could have grown up to be a nice guy, too. It’s too much to ask.
But I need to let go of the hate. I believe it was Thomas Szasz who pointed out that sickening acts are just that — they sicken us. I’m not sure how one faces the sickening acts being committed by the great killers of the world, whether Bush or bin Laden, but I am pretty sure that my spiritual resistance would be stronger if I were not already infected by hatred.
Nietzsche’s saying that doing battle with monsters entails the risk of becoming one seems more insightful to me with each passing year. I refuse to surrender to George Bush’s invitation to live in darkness with him. I cannot love this enemy, but I can refuse to hate. I can focus on loving the people who suffer under his lash. I can focus on letting that love guide me in the search for a better world, one in which people like Bush would be ignored — or perhaps offered treatment — instead of being followed to the abyss.
So I’ll be back.