Fridays, spring, hope, and war

Fridays must be the best invention ever. Especially fridays in the spring, when it is almost May and all the trees have little extensions flowering off of the tips of their naked twigs, and the grass is turning green, and not just where the dogs peed. How grateful I am for spring, for seventy-three degrees and short-sleeve shirts and sunshine that lasts until 8:00. This year has been the worst. It has been the apex of something. What, I don't understand yet. More than high school. My life perhaps?
My English teacher told us that for most people their twenties are the worst and the best times of their lives. I'm fine if I have the best times of my life, but if the times I have been three in middle and high school aren't my worst, I'm not sure I'll survive.
I am grateful for now, though. For the hope in this spring, and for being over the hill so that my futre unfurls before me in dazzling shades. I have been happy all week, amazingly happy, sleep-deprived but hyper and social and ready for life. Is that a record for me? This happy for a week? It might be, if we ignore the mania. It is, at least, a record for 2006.

How wonderful it is, to be alive, now, just now in this moment as my fingers are darting over keys at 78 wpm and the tv is talking about policemen and suicide and drugs. How wonderful for all of those frightening things to be encaged in that screen, that the photons being admitted are maybe at frequences and energies other than x-rays, benignly smashing in insubstantle haphazardness into our eyes. My eyes, with the weighted contacts because my prescreption is -8 or so, my eyes that when I wear glasses might be magnified five times, like inexpensive microscopes. I don't think I've ever been grateful enough for that, for sight, even as it degenerates. For the ability to perceive color. For the intensity of... of this world, this world I have struggled for years to escape from. I tried to live in that monochromatic place inside my head, and was safe. There was the greatest danger of all there, a danger I never could have understood: the danger of ceasing. Of losing connection with my fingers on the keys or the photons hitting my eyes or the nightmares that prove I've known better days. Still, I am different. My friends wear flip-flops and shorts and I don't because I don't feel safe that way. I feel safest layered and sweating, giving off fumes of pear deodorant. Nothing can touch me through thick cotton, can it?
Oh, it is funny the way we try to protect ourselves with meaningless symbolism. But it means something to us, doesn't it?

I have been thinking a lot about war. It is an odd thing to think about on a day like today, but we are talking a lot about Vietnam in history. If I was alive then I would have protested it. However, now we are on the threshold of a new war, and I am not sure what to believe. I hate the idea of war, the concept that we have to kill eachother to solve something that could be solved with words. I would promote passive aggression except that it's a bit heartless to say the United States should just take the terrorism, the 9/11's, passively and wait for the world to react. And how would the world react anyway, to terrorism? Violently, I suppose, with bombs and guns. No pain is avoided.
I think that maybe we should have never gone in. Saddam was a horrible dictator, yes, who did not value individual life in the way that our pseudodemocracy does. But he had control, and now there is none, only the chaos of guerilla Iraqis. My father says they are evil, and the only way to beat them is with their own fire- with violence. How can they be evil? They are fighting for a cause they believe in. Maybe it is a generation-old schism between those nationalities over there we are struggling to unite, but they believe that God is promoting their antics. They have been taught since they were young to hate. Does that make them evil? Is killing American soldiers and little civilian children with car bombs evil if they believe they are doing what is right? How can we define evil that way? We can't call them evil. Their actions are. Murder, in my opinion, of innocents is evil. But that's not how they see it. That's not what they've been taught. So are they evil, for hating, for killing? I don't think so but I am not sure.

War always leads to quagmires. Apparently the United States has been falling in its rank in the world. That does not matter as much, but we need to be able to take care of our own citizens. Losing power, losing rank, it means something if the terrorists gain absolute control of Iraq. Excluding the citizens there that they would be opressing with their hatred, they would pose an incredible threat to the United States. The terrorism would not stop being a threat once it won the war. It would turn against America, especially this new America in a new, vulnerable state.

So we can't pull out. It was stupid, I think, to get involved, because there were no weapons, and Saddam's horrible regime was not as much a threat to the United States as the terrorist one was. I know that we have to look at what he was doing to the Iraqis, but did we honestly think we could come in and work magic and produce democracy in a society that is split into nationalities, and groups of people so infused with hate that they'll bomb anyone? No. There can be no end to what we are doing now. The terrorists will not give up. They live in secret and fight with power, because they are not inhibited with the kind of moral conscience that the US soldiers have. This war could go on and on. But we cannot leave and let the terrorists win, or everyone in the world besides the terrorists is in far worse shape than they are now. Especially as we have made them hate us, meddling in their civil war they intended to win. No, that would be a ridiculous gamble, to assume that the Iraqis could somehow mobilize themselves through their differences and defeat the terrorists. It wouldn't matter, anyway, even if they did by some miracle. Terrorism never dies. It exists in people's souls until it can leak through the organization and tear it apart from within with violence and hatred.

So what do we do? I guess we stay there. I guess that's all we can do. We're in this mess now. We can't let the terrorists win, which is what I think would obviously happen if we suddenly pulled out, or even gradually pulled out. The Iraqis are in no condition to fight their own war. In Vietnam, the consequences were not so great. The communists, the Ho Chi Minh's, the Mao Zedongs, prevailed in the region. But it was not the end of the world, and domino theory did not hold as much water as was expected. But I think that though communists can be a threat to the nation they control, terrorists are a threat to the world. There are no rules with them, no order. No one is safe when a government formed around unrestrained violence exists. So we can't just let them win like we could with Vietnam.

There is no draft. There are too many people, even, enrolled in the army, ready to fight for what they believe in. Do I believe in it? No, I don't see the end. I don't see the end to the war we are fighting. I don't believe in going to the war. I stand by my ideas in eigth grade that it was stupid to blunder in there. But it's too late now. If the soldiers are willing to fight, if they really believe in it, if they believe that the annihilation of terrorism and hatred is possible in the region, then I support them. I have to. There's no longer an alterternative. But the second a draft is passed, the second Americans who do not wish to fight are pushed into this mess of a civil war, then I will oppose it.

Anyway, sorry, that was a long political rant. But I needed to sort through my feelings. I also need to ask some of the people I know that are pushing strongly for leaving Iraq what they intend on the nation doing when terrorists that hate the United States control the country.