Subject: Sister Joan Chittister Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2005 16:22:53 -0600 Message-ID: <B14120EE5C432443B21102F7925DAD020235F1D9@COKE.uwec.edu> From: "Hale, C. Kate" <HALECL@uwec.edu>
Thinking about vigils, about teach-ins. . .
Go to Commondreams to get the clickable link to the photo--if you can
bear to.
Kate
http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0128-35.htm
Published on Friday, January 28, 2005 by the National Catholic Reporter
What the Rest of the World Watched on Inauguration Day
by Joan Chittister
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played
a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The survival
of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in
other lands."
But that was not their lead story.
The picture on the front page of The Irish Times was a large four-color
picture of a small Iraqi girl. Her little body was a coil of steel. She
sat knees up, cowering, screaming madly into the dark night. Her white
clothes and spread hands and small tight face were blood-spattered. The
blood was the blood of her father and mother, shot through the car
window in Tal Afar by American soldiers while she sat beside her parents
in the car, her four brothers and sisters in the back seat.
A series of pictures of the incident played on the inside page, as well.
A 12-year-old brother, wounded in the fray, falls face down out of the
car when the car door opens, the pictures show. In another, a soldier
decked out in battle gear, holds a large automatic weapon on the four
children, all potential enemies, all possible suicide bombers,
apparently, as they cling traumatized to one another in the back seat
and the child on the ground goes on screaming in her parent's blood.
No promise of "freedom" rings in the cutline on this picture. No joy of
liberty underlies the terror on these faces here.
I found myself closing my eyes over and over again as I stared at the
story, maybe to crush the tears forming there, maybe in the hope that
the whole scene would simply disappear.
But no, like the photo of a naked little girl bathed in napalm and
running down a road in Vietnam served to crystallize the situation there
for the rest of the world, I knew that this picture of a screaming,
angry, helpless, orphaned child could do the same.
The soldiers standing in the dusk had called "halt," the story said, but
no one did. Maybe the soldiers' accents were bad. Maybe the car motor
was unduly noisy. Maybe the children were laughing loudly -- the way
children do on family trips. Whatever the case, the car did not stop,
the soldiers shot with deadly accuracy, seven lives changed in an
instant: two died in body, five died in soul.
BBC news announced that the picture was spreading across Europe like a
brushfire that morning, featured from one major newspaper to another,
served with coffee and Danish from kitchen table to kitchen table in one
country after another. I watched, while Inauguration Day dawned across
the Atlantic, as the Irish up and down the aisle on the train from
Killarney to Dublin, narrowed their eyes at the picture, shook their
heads silently and slowly over it, and then sat back heavily in their
seats, too stunned into reality to go back to business as usual -- the
real estate section, the sports section, the life-style section of the
paper.
Here was the other side of the inauguration story. No military bands
played for this one. No bulletproof viewing stands could stop the impact
of this insight into the glory of force. Here was an America they could
no longer understand. The contrast rang cruelly everywhere.
I sat back and looked out the train window myself. Would anybody in the
United States be seeing this picture today? Would the United States ever
see it, in fact? And if it is printed in the United States, will it also
cross the country like wildfire and would people hear the unwritten
story under it?
There are 54 million people in Iraq. Over half of them are under the age
of 15. Of the over 100,000 civilians dead in this war, then, over half
of them are children. We are killing children. The children are our
enemy. And we are defeating them.
"I'll tell you why I voted for George Bush," a friend of mine said. "I
voted for George Bush because he had the courage to do what Al Gore and
John Kerry would never have done."
I've been thinking about that one.
Osama Bin Laden is still alive. Sadam Hussein is still alive. Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi is still alive. Baghdad, Mosul and Fallujah are burning. But
my government has the courage to kill children or their parents. And I'm
supposed to be impressed.
That's an unfair assessment, of course. A lot of young soldiers have
died, too. A lot of weekend soldiers are maimed for life. A lot of our
kids went into the military only to get a college education and are now
shattered in soul by what they had to do to other bodies.
A lot of adult civilians have been blasted out of their homes and their
neighborhoods and their cars. More and more every day. According to U.N.
Development Fund for Women, 15 percent of wartime casualties in World
War I were civilians. In World War II, 65 percent were civilians. By the
mid '90s, over 75 percent of wartime casualties were civilians.
In Iraq, for every dead U.S. soldier, there are 14 other deaths, 93
percent of them are civilian. But those things happen in war, the story
says. It's all for a greater good, we have to remember. It's all to free
them. It's all being done to spread "liberty."
From where I stand, the only question now is who or what will free us
from the 21st century's new definition of bravery. Who will free us from
the notion that killing children or their civilian parents takes
courage?
A Benedictine Sister of Erie, Sister Joan is a best-selling author and
well-known international lecturer. She is founder and executive director
of Benetvision: A Resource and Research Center for Contemporary
Spirituality, and past president of the Conference of American
Benedictine Prioresses and the Leadership Conference of Women Religious.
Sister Joan has been recognized by universities and national
organizations for her work for justice, peace and equality for women in
the Church and society. She is an active member of the International
Peace Council.
(c) 2005 The National Catholic Reporter
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