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November 28, 2002

Happy Thanksgiving (from Austria)...

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November 11, 2002

Inveterate

After the terrorist attack on lower Manhattan, I think it's fair to say that all of us New Yorkers are veterans of a sort. I might have said as much beforehand, and without limitation, as we are all surely veterans of Life, and it galls me to grant privileged status to war and its wagers. Still, we have been touched more deeply hereabouts, and people who would never wield a weapon have been battered as much as any combatants. Even those who seek sanctuary in the Park bear reminders of our recent unnatural history.

The horror of war is one thing, ("honoring" veterans is, in part, a way of dispensing with our complicity in that horror,) and maybe those of us who did not lose life or limb shouldn't presume to claim any measure of equivalence. I certainly wouldn't for myself, but I can't help but contemplate the psychic fallout that must have hit another birder I encounter with some regularity in the Park. Rebekah Creshkoff has gone beyond birdwatching as a sport. She’s deeply involved with the plight of our native species, to the point of becoming an activist on their behalf. One of her main concerns has been the problem of tower kills, where huge numbers of migrating birds die colliding with tall buildings or communications towers, usually in bad weather. It was her practice to arrive early at the World Trade Center and collect the victims on such occasions, nursing the few survivors, cataloging the rest, and sending their corpses off for the consideration of scientists. That those towers should be the scene of human carnage on a comparable scale, even as the hazard they represented became a casualty of the same event, beggars my powers of comprehension and emotional response.
But that’s what war does to people.

So Rebekah is certainly a veteran, and I’m happy to honor her, but I think even she was a little surprised at my failure to endorse another sort of slaughter, that of the Brown-headed Cowbird. Well-meaning conservationists are waging war against the Cowbird. It's a native bird, not an invasive, but it has the unpleasant habit of laying its eggs in other species' nests, earning it the rank of parasite. The host birds raise the Cowbird chicks, to the detriment of their own, and the Cowbird is considered an important factor in the decline of many songbird species. In Michigan, where the endangered Kirtland's Warbler has its limited nesting range, Cowbird control programs are part of the strategy for saving the species. Of course, "control" means "killing". I'm always suspicious of euphemisms, just as I'm suspicious of any solution which involves defining some group as the enemy, with the suggestion that if we just kill the bad guys everything will be all right. It seems to me that this is how war and terror typically proceed.

I don't pretend to have the answers, for birds or for people, but I do have misgivings about institutionalized killing, even when it may be justifiable. I suppose that it is a sort of natural law that when someone tries to kill you, you are thereby justified in killing them, but the purported Christian heritage of the West once taught something different. "Turn the other cheek" and "love thy enemy" were revolutionary ideas in their time, but they derived from the faith, hope, and love of the powerless. Once Christianity ascended to power such ideals were jettisoned in a betrayal of faith and tradition which continues to this day, at least insofar as our culture claims to represent Christian values.

That being the case, I went down to Washington, trying to stop the impending war.
I am not much given to such activism, being essentially apolitical. My position is the ascetic one of the observer; the outsider. It's hardly tenable, but it's where I have been forced. An outsider I was, on the day in October when an anti-war rally was mounted in Central Park. Traversing the Great Hill, I began to hear distant sounds from a crowd on the East Meadow, but it took a while to realize what was going on, and I didn't know until later that friends of mine had been there. It was those friends that made the difference to me between action and inaction. I found myself feeling bad, not for my own lack of commitment, but because I wanted to join in their commitment; my pain was that of exclusion, rather than moral failure. Yet that is the way of any mass-effort: many are enlisted more by the momentum than the meaning.

We learn from our friends, and sometimes peer pressure can lead us where we need to go, but it's also a microcosm of mob psychology. Writ large, the like-minded assembly comes to resemble the very thing we would oppose: an army focused on a foe. It's to the credit of my associates that they recognized this, and out of their struggle with the means and aims of protestation came the notion of a high-spirited contingent, more like a rock band than a band of soldiers, libidinous and ecstatic, defying the dogma of politics. The amount of effort and planning it took to manifest such a group, and get them to DC, may have belied the image we created, but it was worthwhile, I think, even to march in a circle around the disinterested seat of power. At least the warmongers must make the effort to ignore us.

I have some memory of the Vietnam era protests; I even participated in a couple, in the company of my parents. They were hardly radicals, but resistance then was more advanced than today. For my part, I was a would-be hippie, making an adolescent gesture towards something larger than my understanding. In my mind hippies, radicals, and anti-establishment types of all stripes were conflated in their common rejection of mainstream politics. Being against the war was “cool”, even to a twelve year old, but it took years, and thousands of dead to make it so.

I hope we don’t have to go through that again, but war is always about repeating a mistake, and the years bring as much forgetfulness as learning. We have forgotten much of what we learned in the 60’s, leaving us to grapple with many of the same issues. I now have a better understanding of the gap between the true hippies, who were quasi-spiritual dropouts, and the radical activists, who were political strategists seeking allies. They shared a disgust with the war, but the hippies weren’t much for the party discipline of the organized activists. They were for the other kind of party, and they brought a subversive theatricality to the act of protest, threatening not only to the establishment, but to that form of resistance which only mirrors the object of its enmity. If the last quarter of a century has not done much to advance the dialogue, we will just have to take it up again. At least that’s my understanding of how I ended up a middle aged protester. “Make love, not war” is no more ridiculous than “love thy enemy”. And if war seems sensible to people, then we’re much in need of a dose of the ridiculous. What we don’t need is more veterans.
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October 31, 2002

Hallow It All

Tonight we welcome frightful dark
We relish our own fear
We fear that life is all too drab
So let the dead appear

Yet what are we but dead to be
Will we be braver then
Or hope to hide a quaking heart
Behind a skeleton?

We hallow Halloween with fear
For what we must become
But waking dawn will soon reveal
That trick and treat are one

(Oh, one other thing…)
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