Mor or Less Sick of Plague - Part 1

Anger and exhaustion with bi-partisan American politics of military and economic world domination seems to be the opening anthem of summer 2007. Rufus Wainwright's feeble protest song "Going to a Town," with its recurring refrain "I'm so tired of America" is garnering a lot of attention, and Cindy Sheehan's "resignation letter" posted on The Daily Kos yesterday is a heart's cry of exhausted despair from a woman who has given her all in a cause the rest of us knew was lost, from the start: the cause of peace, the cause of uniting this country against the Iraq war. I've heard Cindy speak several times in her odyssey around the world exhorting people to stand with her in her call for an end to the military madness in the Middle East, and it was clear there was no way she wasn't going to eventually burn out. The current performance of our hard-fought Democratic Congress was, for her, the final straw that has caused her to abandon her single-minded campaign for peace (Letter to the Democratic Congress.) Scroll down a ways through the several other articles at this link.

I am as tired as Rufus and as despairing as Cindy, but I am one of the people Sheehan points to in her letter, who is "not willing to do more than walk in a protest march or sit behind his/her computer criticizing others." Several times I almost headed for Crawford, to join the campers trying futilely to get Dubya to stop chainsawing stuff on his "ranch" and come out and listen to them, but something else always seemed more important: a class I was teaching, packing for the move west, the move west itself, always something urgent to my life. So, I am no spokeswoman for anything, there is nothing for me to officially resign from -the Democratic Party wouldn't notice my defection - and where would I go?... the Greens? the Socialists? There is no way to officially proclaim my anger and exhaustion.I've recently been rereading Camus' The Plague, a novel that became a sort of credo when I was a much younger person. I underlined these lines when I was perhaps twenty:

It's a wearying business, being plague-stricken. But it's still more wearying to refuse to be it. That's why everybody in the world today looks so tired; everyone is more or less sick of plague. But that is also why some of us, those who want to get the plague out of their systems, feel such desperate weariness, a weariness from which nothing remains to set us free except death.

Well, it was youthful existentialism that caused me to take my pencil to those lines, not terminal political despair and exhaustion, of which I then knew little or nothing (though, trying to explain the USA as I traveled through Europe with the VN war raging, I certainly thought I did.) But I think these lines entirely apropos to the way Cindy Sheehan feels, the way I feel, the way perhaps many of you feel. We are suffering a moral plague in this country, our leaders have infected us with it, it has spread around the world. I fear it is going to take not just an election, a new set of leaders, a new party at the helm, to rid us of this plague.

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