I've been having writers block lately, and can't seem to write anything new, so I've dug into the TankGurl archives for some old posts from my very first attempts at blogging. I hope they don't suck completely.
This is a piece I wrote just after September 11th, in the aftermath of the shock of being attacked, and the fear of rising Christianity and nationalism.
The war began during the halftime of the Redskins/Giants game. My partner Allison and I had just gotten back from a pleasant weekend in West Virginia, where we engaged in all those autumn activities like walking around in fallen leaves, eating newly picked apples, making love in a sparsely furnished cabin in the middle of the day. We enjoyed being away from DC, it was quiet, and we did not feel compelled to switch on the television once during the entire weekend. There were many reminders of the recent crisis. Many American flags waved past us on cars, or flew from the porches of rural houses. Signs hung from overpasses with flags reading “God Bless American”. “American Stands with God”. “In God We Trust.Do You?” I began to feel a flicker of worry, a whisper of anxiety that I always do when I encounter religious slogans shouting from hand painted signs. The ones I have been most familiar with in my recent past spoke Christian phrases like “God Hates Gays” and “Fags Burn in Hell”. Wasn't it blind devotion to dogma that began these troubles in the first place? And now, not only was I a heathen homosexual, but I seemed to be the only atheist left in the country. I was nervous. Visions of people being baptized in the bacteria plagued Potomac River flashed before my eyes. My fifth grade teacher Sister Mary of No Mercy was there. This was not going to be good.
I managed to tuck these gruesome visions away in the part of my brain that says, “You’re getting wacko! Stop it!”. Back at home, the Redskins were fumbling the ball on every other possession. It was a thing most painful to watch. That’s when the war started. Fox News interrupted the game to bring the most urgent news.
We were at war with Afghanistan.
I listened to news people talk about the air strikes in front of an image of an explosion over some distant darkened sky. I listened to the military experts telling people all over the country what sort of operation was unfolding. I kept waiting to feel some bit of pity for the people who would most surely die before the football game was over. I waited for some tiny bit of human empathy to come to me, and when it didn’t I felt unclean. I have always thought of myself as if not an upright person, then at least a decent person. The basic values of Christianity struck me as a reasonable set of rules to live my live by. Love your neighbor, honor your parents, don't kill or covet. Respect others. And I still won't call myself an atheist, because I'm always holding out hope that there is someone out there somewhere who is smarter than us, and more deserving of devotion than the gods that we are stuck with here on Earth.
I've always felt sort of superior to the believers in my detachment from deities. But the superiority separates me from the rest of the human race who believe that there is Someone watching over us.
As I watched the war planes take off, I felt no pity for the human targets. I felt like I wanted my bit of justice. I felt outraged that they dared attack the things that I hold dear to me, like my way of life, and the right to live as I please, the right to hold a different belief than the majority, whether it be in my lifestyle, the people I choose to love, or my decision not to belong to the great masses that are different from me in their right to worship whomever strikes their hearts as most true. But then as I looked at the war planes ascending, I was thinking that maybe my moral values are self serving, because I can justify this blood thirst in my soul somehow, and cannot muster in my heart one bit of sympathy for the men and women who will perish under the rain of American made missiles.
As I picture my justice, I envisioned a young man maybe in his late twenties from Alabama or Georgia who was just now flying his jet into some unfriendly territory. And as he flies, he is not thinking about the middle aged, agnostic lesbian residing in his nation's capital who’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness he is defending at this very moment. Maybe he finds my choices just as offensive as his enemies do. Maybe he thinks that deep down inside I am a sinner, and that I have not yet realized the error of my ways, or maybe he thinks that I haven’t yet met the right sort of man, and that he could change my mind. Maybe he is just as pissed off as I am that some third-world freaks dared to attack America. Maybe he’s not thinking anything about his mission, he’s just following orders and hoping to get home to his family in one piece. I can’t imagine what he is thinking, I am just hoping that those folks who are paid to do the thinking for him have thought well and hard on the mission, and that he will live to an outrageous age and see all of his children flourish.
I imagine the odor of jet fuel and I wonder what we are fighting for? Revenge? Freedom? I wonder what will justify the killing of other humans? What will we end up with after this war is finished that will justify the death?
And me, I am in some way praying for this pilot, this young man from Georgia, sending him positive energy, wishing him protection from harm and hoping with all my heart that he can get back safely so that he can raise his Christian children and be able to spend a lifetime of Sundays in some church free to worship as he pleases. I don’t care that he’s from Alabama, I don’t care if he’s a Baptist, or that he votes Republican, or that he hates me, right now he is flying into harms way, and I only care that he comes back safely, and that my demand for vengeance does not result in his death.
In the secular depths of my soul, I think of him and whisper.
