In a minute

Note: This post was written by guest blogger Sra. Bibliotecaria.

Almost exactly a year ago, Maj. Andy Olmsted died in Iraq.

I thought of Andy again when I heard that trauma surgeon John Pryor had been killed in Iraq on Christmas Day. Beyond the devastating loss to his loved ones, our world is poorer for having lost his passionate honesty. Indeed, the first I ever heard of him was through his 2007 op-ed about parallels between his work overseas and at home:

In Iraq, ironically, I found myself drawing on my experience as a civilian trauma surgeon each time [mass casualties] would overrun the combat hospital. As nine or 10 patients from a firefight rolled in, I sometimes caught myself saying “just like another Friday night in West Philadelphia.”

The wounds and nationalities of the patients are different, but the feelings of helplessness, despair and loss are the same. In Iraq, soldiers die for freedom, for honor, for their country and for their buddies. Here in Philadelphia, they die without honor, without purpose, for no country, for no one.

More young men are killed each day on the streets of America than on the worst days of carnage and loss in Iraq. There is a war at home raging every day, filling our trauma centers with so many wounded children that it sometimes makes Baghdad seem like a quiet city in Iowa. Unlike the Iraq conflict, this war is not on the front pages of The Post or on CNN.

Pryor was in a better position than most of us both to see this bloody misery firsthand and to bear witness to it. It would have been enough that he used his hands to heal; that he also used his voice to advocate was an act of profound generosity.

It takes titantic self-confidence to cut into human flesh, even to heal. I don’t know what it was like to live with Dr. Pryor or even have him as a colleague. I do know that the obituary was shocking to me, though as the song says we should know how fast the world can change:

Lying here in the darkness
I hear the sirens wail
Somebody going to emergency
Somebody’s going to jail
If you find somebody to love in this world
You better hang on tooth and nail
The wolf is always at the door
In a New York minute
Everything can change
In a New York minute

Back to Andy Olmsted, and his farewell message:

[F]or those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.

My own true love

Being home in bed with the flu has allowed me to rewatch Gone With the Wind, which I first saw as a young teen. It is an incredible story, but what struck me was how much less I would enjoy it if I had seen it for the first time as an adult.

Watching it now, it’s hard to scrub your mind of the context of what was going on in the late 1930s when the movie was made. Eleanor Roosevelt and civil rights leaders were trying desperately and unsuccessfully to get anti-lynching legislation passed. President Franklin Roosevelt and Senate Democrats blocked it repeatedly: too divisive an issue, and they had other priorities.

To repeat: For Congress to condemn the kidnapping, torture, and murder of U.S. citizens by gangs of vigilantes was seen as divisive.

GWTW is an apologia for slavery in the sense that it doesn’t even bother to make excuses for it. It’s as natural and accepted as pretty dresses, marriage proposals, and dozens of beaux — that is, a backdrop. Slaves are referred to by the euphemism “servants,” and despite the Academy Award-winning performance of Hattie McDaniel, there is no awareness that the black characters may have lives or histories of their own.

When Scarlett comes home to a ruined plantation and the death of her mother from typhoid, we see the sympathetic faces of the few remaning slaves. But the movie does not betray by so much as a twitch of a camera that the slaves themselves may have suffered the loss of their own parents, far earlier and in much more brutal ways.

The movie isn’t about the slaves, of course. It’s about Scarlett, and it’s a darned good story about her. But the lush romance of the music, the beautiful sweep of the camera across the land — these are seductive distractions from the fact that while millions of Depression-era moveigoers basked in the nostalgia, we were failing to live up to the sweetest, strongest promise of the American dream: Equal protection under the law.

Obama gets it

An endorsement from David Rees, the man behind the satirical comic Get Your War On:

Cluster bombs and landmines are particularly terrifying weapons that wreak havoc on communities trying to recover from war. They are fatal impediments to reconstruction and rehabilitation of agricultural land; they destroy valuable livestock; they disable otherwise productive members of society; they maim or kill children trying to salvage them for scrap metal.

Over 150 nations have signed the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty. It pains me that our great nation has not. But in the autumn of 2006, there was a chance to take a step in the right direction: Senate Amendment No. 4882, an amendment to a Pentagon appropriations bill that would have banned the use of cluster bombs in civilian areas.

Senator Obama of Illinois voted IN FAVOR of the ban.

[...] As is so often the case, there was no political cost to doing the wrong thing. And there was no political reward for doing the right thing. But Senator Obama did the right thing.

Read the whole thing.

The question I most want to ask

To the Presidential candidates:

What executive powers will you relinquish on your first day in office? And how, precisely, will you go about relinquishing them?

The abandonment of habeas corpus and related rights is to me one of the most horrific and shameful developments in American history. Restoring those critical rights may be the single most important issue for our new president. That’s why I was heartened to see this endorsement from Habeas Lawyers for Obama:

When others stood back, Senator Obama helped lead the fight in the Senate against the Administration’s efforts in the Fall of 2006 to strip the courts of jurisdiction, and when we were walking the halls of the Capitol trying to win over enough Senators to beat back the Administration’s bill, Senator Obama made his key staffers and even his offices available to help us. Senator Obama worked with us to count the votes, and he personally lobbied colleagues who worried about the political ramifications of voting to preserve habeas corpus for the men held at Guantanamo.

It’s not perfect, and who knows whether Obama will even be the nominee, much less our next president. But that’s the kind of executive power I’d like to see.

If I should die…

One of the clearest and best military bloggers I’ve read during this war is Andrew Olmsted. A true citizen-soldier, Andrew’s beliefs and actions came from deep conviction and careful thought. He did not take lightly his decision to volunteer for active service, and he knew he would almost certainly be sent to Iraq.

He was killed there two days ago.

I still can’t believe how shocked and saddened I am. This is the way of war: People die. Thousands and tens of thousands of them, but each one makes it new again. I am a stranger who simply admired his writing; I can’t imagine the pain and grief his family must feel.

Andy left a blog post to be published in the event of his death. It’s typical Andy: Blunt, funny, geeky, and opinionated. You gotta love a man who can quote Wedding Crashers, The Princess Bride, and Babylon 5 in his self-obituary.

It must be an amazingly strange thing to write your farewell letter. Andy’s ranged from the personal to the worldly, with time for jokes and admonitions:

But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war.

Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

But for those who knew me and feel this pain, I think it’s a good thing to realize that this pain has been felt by thousands and thousands (probably millions, actually) of other people all over the world. That is part of the cost of war, any war, no matter how justified. If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision.

This may be a contradiction of my above call to keep politics out of my death, but I hope not. Sometimes going to war is the right idea. I think we’ve drawn that line too far in the direction of war rather than peace, but I’m a soldier and I know that sometimes you have to fight if you’re to hold onto what you hold dear.

But in making that decision, I believe we understate the costs of war; when we make the decision to fight, we make the decision to kill, and that means lives and families destroyed. Mine now falls into that category; the next time the question of war or peace comes up, if you knew me at least you can understand a bit more just what it is you’re deciding to do, and whether or not those costs are worth it.

Are we a nation of laws?

For the last few years, our courts have been engaged in a titanic struggle with the president and with Congress to decide whether we are allowed to imprison people forever, without charges or trial or evidence.

It makes me heartsick that we even have a struggle over this. Our country prides itself on the fact that we aren’t run by a king or a dictator who can put us in prison on a whim, and keep us there while our bodies fall apart and our families grieve. But our leaders claim that the world is so scary now that they have to be able to lock people up forever — without saying why.

Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said the president couldn’t have a “blank check” for doing whatever he wanted. Well, last week the president’s lawyers were back in court arguing that indeed he can.

They call it “preventative detention for the duration of hostilities.” Translated: Lock you up until we decide there is no more terrorism in the world.

This is not the country I love.

Increase the peace

Remember being 18? Hamid Floyd does, because he is 18. He made a film about the violence that saturates Philadelphia right now, and its impact on him and others.

Hamid’s film won second place in a contest, but that’s not why you should watch it. Watch it because it’s good. And because it’s a really gutsy, brave thing for a teenager to do, and because even if there were no more murders in Philadelphia this year, we would still already have had one for every single day of the year.

Stop the violence. Increase the peace.

Watch the film.

What can be said?

This piece by Christopher Hitchens is deeply moving:

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and self-described agnostic, a U.C.L.A. honors graduate, and during his college days had fairly decided reservations about the war in Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a page when I saw the following:

“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him … “

(Found via Branching Between Towers)

1 in 500 Americans is a terrorist supporter?

That seems ridiculously high, doesn’t it?

Well, the GAO says the Terrorist Watch List is now up to about 800,000 names. In a nation of roughly 300 million people, that would break down to 1 in 400 Americans.

But of course, some names are duplicates or aliases. Some are non-U.S. citizens. So let’s say 1 in 500 Americans. Still — that’s an awful lot of terrorist supporters. And of course, our government won’t allow us to know why our names are being put on the list, nor is there a clear process for being taken off. Needless to say, I am not confident that this list makes us safer.

Full report (pdf). I particularly like the bit on page 11, where the researchers confide that the CIA refused to talk to them. Way to work together, guys.

(Via Wired, via ACS.)

The war in Spain

Being here in Spain the last few days has allowed me to get a little window on how the war(s) is/are looking from outside the U.S. The news here has been full of the story of two young soldiers who died in Afghanistan, and there was a protest today in Seville against the wars.

Speaking of wars, I´m noticing that everyone from protestors to the national press (what I´ve seen of it) seems to tie Iraq and Afghanistan far more tightly than in the U.S. At home, the public is decidedly gloomy about the Iraq war, while Afghanistan is more or less invisible. Even so, I would imagine — and when I´m not at an Internet cafe on my vacation I´ll probably look this up to verify — that if you polled Americans today, you´d still get a solid 70% in favor of staying in Afghanistan.

The rhetoric I´m hearing in Spain doesn´t support that. Of course, I don´t know enough about Spanish politics to make any sort of educated guesses about how much domestic exasperation is being taken out on the president (a la ¨Why are you letting Bush push you around?¨)

Also, I asked the young woman handing out flyers at the demonstration if the group was a religious one and she looked at me like I had two heads. There´s a data point in favor of Europe as much more secular than the U.S. (I did explain to her that in my country, groups protesting the war are often doing it in part because of religious beliefs. Just so she wouldn´t think my question was coming out of thin air.)