Fall comes to central Virginia

I love these crisp autumn days when the heavy cloak of foliage has fallen away from the trees. We live in the region known as the Virginia “Piedmont”– mainly some bumpy little hills on the southeast flank of Blue Ridge mountains. What is interesting as fall comes is that when you look at any of our thickly-wooded hills outlined against the horizon, you can see the true shape of the hill there, fringed by the spindly outlines of its big crop of trees.
Maybe this is a metaphor for the present falling-off of the big cloak of lies the warmongers told us earlier as they tried to jerk public opinion into supporting this ill-considered war against Iraq?
Here in Charlottesville, as families and friends gather for Thanksgiving and the great smells of Thanksgiving cooking start to fill our homes, many of the people in the Charlottesville Center for Peace and Justice are starting to dust off their (our) antiwar placards and launch a resumption of the public antiwar vigils that CCPJ used to organize every week, rain or shine, outside our local US federal building.
Those vigils continued for many years–with a prime focus on the continuing US-UK actions against Iraq, but also taking inother issues like the attack against Afghanistan. In 2002 and early this year, as the debate over invading Iraq became very intense, the CCPJ’s vigils would attract 50 or 60 people each Thursday, and Tuesday-afternoon vigils were organized, too.
As part of that energy, the CCPJ’s blue yard-signs proliferated around the whole city. The signs say “Say no to war” on one side, and “Stand up for peace” on the other. As I wrote here earlier, the ones I planted in our front yard sometimes stayed a few days, sometimes got stolen or trashed very quickly… But I guess they did get noticed!
Time to put one out again.
Also, a big CCPJ campaign back in January/February succeeded in persuading our city council to pass a resolution declaring C’ville to be “a city of peace”, and urging the national government against taking any step in Iraq that was not explicitly authorized by the United Nations.
But, that campaign to prevent our national government from launching its unilateral and aggressive war against Iraq failed. This time around– by which I mean, heading into next year’s presidential election–the stakes in our battle against national-level militarism will be much, much higher.
It’s important to note that last spring’s offensive against Iraq was launched quite in line with the President’s September 2002 “National Security Strategy” document that advocated the launching of preventive and not merely pre-emptive war. So if this President, having acted thus, and in accordance with his own stated doctrine of international engagement, gets re-elected then that would send a powerful and very depressing signal around the whole world. Namely, that the American people supports this policy of aggressive unilateralism. Plus, it would give the militarists in our country a degree of legitimation for their approach to international affairs.
It is true that political realism and the howls of protest that the Bushies have been hearing from inside the uniformed military have already caused them to curtail their earlier ambitions significantly.
Remember the time back in April/May when the rightwing media here were full of promises that Iran, or Syria, or North Korea, or whatever, would be next in line for a US invasion?
We’re not hearing those bullying and vainglorious threats nearly so much these days. Thank God. And the administration certainly looks as though it’s trying to cobble together some kind of a quick “exit strategy” that will bring the bulk of the US forces out of Iraq next summer– in time for the elections!–and never mind about some of those more ambitious goals about “re-making Iraq” or “re-making the entire Middle East” or whatever.
So yes, there is some “realism” there in Washington (though the Transition Plan for Iraq that was announced November 16 looks almost completely unworkable at this point, as well as highly undemocratic.)
But I still don’t think that most of the Bushies have learned the broader lesson about the unworkability, immorality, and sheer arrogance of the whole doctrine of “preventive war” in the present age, let alone the even broader (and very pragmatic) lesson that the security of US citizens and institutions cannot be assured by relying on the use or threat of force against the other 96% of the world’s people, but must be based instead on the establishment and maintenance of networks of good relationships with non-US peoples and institutions of the world.
Is this so very hard to see, and to understand? Four percent trying to dominate 96 percent by the use and threat of force?
Maybe the Bushies should have a word with some of the Afrikaaner volk there in South Africa. Those good white “Christian” leaders thought they could dominate their little multicultural microcosm through reliance on force alone, and without giving the non-White peoples any meaningful say at all in determining the policies that affected them all…. They tried and tried and tried. (Along the way, apartheid was declared by the UN to be a “crime against humanity”. That didn’t stop them.)
But at the end of the day, the Afrikaaners recognized that their attempt to monopolize all decisionmaking power in the hands of a small minority was unworkable, and they bowed to the swelling demands from around the world that they give their country’s non-White people an equal, democratic voice in decisionmaking. For many of the Afrikaaners, making that swiytch to going along with democratic power-sharing was not easy. They had so many fears about what the non-White peoples might do to them!
But it all worked out alright. Amazingly; miraculously. Thanks to what one of my South African friends called “the Madiba Effect” (that is, the amazing spirit of reconciliation and generosity promulgated by Nelson Mandela), the transition to democracy went much more smoothly than anyone beforehand could have expected.
Yes, there is still much righting of old wrongs that remains to be done there. But taken altogether, still, a miracle.
Did I mention that in the days of White monpolization of power in South Africa, the Whitefolks there made up around 17 percent of the national population? And even with that percentage they found they could not sustain their exclusive and brutal system.
So why should anyone imagine that at the global level, the 4 percent of the world’s people who are US citizens can monopolize global power on matters of common concern to everyone?
It’s crazy. And luckily, there are a good number of us here in the US who realize that, and are determined to change things. Let me go out to the garage and look for my old blue yard signs…