War is an Abstract
“No one won the last war, and no one will win the next war.”
–Eleanor Roosevelt
I grew up watching the news on television. Walter Cronkite explained that the footage from Vietnam told a story of chaos, cruelty, heroism, and loss. One of the English teachers from the school I would eventually attend held a weekly candlelight vigil in our town for her only child, a Yale student who was killed in Vietnam in 1967. When I asked my mother why she kept protesting the war that had stolen her son, my mother sighed and said, “What else can she do?”
May 9, 1970, a week after the Kent State shootings, 100,000 demonstrators converged on Washington to protest the shootings and Nixon’s incursion into Cambodia. My father brought me to this demonstration. I’m not sure why I, the youngest, was chosen, but what I remember was the thrill of being allowed to yell along with the other approximately 25,000 people to the chorus of a Country Joe and the Fish song, “One, two, three, four, we don’t want your fucking war!” checking with my dad to be sure it was okay. It was. My oldest sister was in college which now seemed like a place where she could get badly hurt or killed.
photo by Chandler Cruttenden
Another memory is my father. My wonderful, funny, distant daddy, whom I seldom had to myself. He held my childhood hostage, ruining everything when he drank into violent blackouts but also sober, making life better than perfect because he was so brilliant and good. The magic of holding his hand throughout that day, probably to keep me from disappearing into the massive crowd, was a reminder of my childhood when cuddling was still allowed. At thirteen my father seemed to find my changing body something to avoid.
For me, war is an abstract.
It is a scene in a movie when two Marines ring a doorbell, and the woman of the house, the mother, starts to scream. It’s pictures of what are essentially children being carried off battlefields, wounded or dead, by other children. In our present-day, war is represented by drones, people in uniforms sitting in front of computers aiming bombs at targets found by satellites. Yet the results are the same: mayhem, chaos, the tragic loss of young lives, the future obliterated.
This war between Israel and Gaza is yet another conflict between those who share land reluctantly, whose food, traditions, and beliefs are similar yet wildly different, and whose demands speak of the same deep wish for security and a place to call home. A war not unlike Russia’s attack on Ukraine, people who resemble each other, who have much more in common than they have differences, a war that, like the Civil War in this country, pitted neighbors against each other, so brother killed brother. In Ireland, during the height of the Troubles, one would be hard-pressed to tell the Protestant from the Catholic.
The results are the same: buildings reduced to rubble, lives destroyed, children left by parents or, as in so many wars, buried in graves, their lives barely started. Living in northern Michigan, we are removed from much of what is occurring around the world. So far, the warming of the climate has resulted in being able to swim in the numerous lakes later than usual without a wetsuit. Migrants from other war zones seldom make their way here. We have no natural support systems for those who have been devastated by what is essentially war, smaller wars, and localized conflicts that make remaining in their homeland an impossibility.
While I can claim the grief over the events in Israel and Gaza is collective grief, I sit here in our cozy home, allowed to live out my life, knowing my son is safe, witnessing the trauma and violence through scenes caught on television and posted on social media. I still wonder, as I did as a child, what stroke of luck kept me from being born into conflict other than the domestic trauma of growing up in an alcoholic home. I don’t believe things happen for a reason especially war. We wage war out of fear, prejudice, anger, hate and hubris. These are not reasons. They are terrible failures to see one’s enemy as human.
—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach