Wednesday, August 20, 2003

Personal Iraq

Note: I just saw that Bush is planning on requesting help from the U.N. in the form of a Security Council resolution authorizing other nations to produce troops. I said in the blog below that Bush wouldn’t do this, and I was apparently wrong. Thankfully. Maybe I can worry about my cousin a little less now....

On Sunday, I heard from parents that my cousin, a Major in the Army last I heard, is going back to Iraq. I say going back because he was in the Persian Gulf War in ‘91. One war, twelve years, who knows how many different postings (including a stint teaching at West Point), and three children later, and my cousin is going back to the damned Persian Gulf again.

If you’ve been reading my blogs for long, you know that I was against the first Persian Gulf war when I was in high school, but that I always supported the soldiers who did the fighting. And that I had a cousin in the Gulf War. This is the same guy.

He’s a conservative, as is his wife, born-again Christians both, and I’ll admit that I haven’t exactly been kind in my appraisals of born-again Christians recently. But he’s family, and he’s great with his kids, his wife, his brothers and their wives, his parents, and the entire extended family. And he’s the reason I’m damn proud to be related to a professional Army soldier.

And now, having done his duty once already, he’s being sent to do it again. I was worried when he was deployed last time, but at least we truly were liberating a people. Kuwaitis truly wanted us to free them, and they truly greeted us warmly. Sure, there were some problems – it wouldn’t have been a war if there hadn’t been problems here and there. But this time, we’re invaders. I don’t give a flying fuck what Bush or his Gods-be-damned puppet-master “advisors” say otherwise, we invaded a country and are now occupying it. And because we’re invaders, we’re not welcome.

The U.N. knows we’re occupiers and it holds us responsible (or will soon enough) for the security lapse that was the truck bomb at their headquarters in Baghdad. The international community knows it, and because occupiers are never looked on kindly by those being occupied, they’re showing remarkable common sense and refusing to send their soldiers into Iraq to die. And most importantly, the Iraqis know it.

Sure, some of the Iraqis cheered for our troops when we rolled into town. Some people always will. And some of them are thrilled we’re still there. But you know what? Iraqis are proud. Proud of their long history, proud of how they threw out the British in the early 1900s, proud of being Muslims and Arabs. And proud people chafe under occupation. Just imagine, for a moment, how we’d feel if we’d been “liberated” and were now being occupied by some foreign power. It’s no wonder that Iraqis are losing patience with the United States.

And soon my cousin will be on the front lines again. Charging into bunkers in Kuwait in ‘91 wasn’t enough. No, “our great country” demands more blood, sweat, and tears from my cousin and his family. But this time, every Iraqi on the street could be an assassin. Every car could be a suicide bomber with his name carved into the engine block. Every RPG might be aimed at his Bradley or Hummer, whichever he’s going to be in. And while he understands his duty, and so do I (as well as anyone who wasn’t called to fight in a war can), that doesn’t mean it’s right.

Rumsfeld is still saying that we don’t need more soldiers in Iraq, that the soldiers there can keep the peace and train the Iraqis to police themselves. Complete and utter bullshit. He’s got his head jammed so far up his ass that he couldn’t hear a truck bomb explosion if it happened next door, never mind hear rational voices telling him he’s got no fucking clue how to run a military. Bush refuses to send the State Department out to ask for help from the U.N. because France, Germany, and India are demanding that a brand new Security Council resolution be approved to dispatch international forces. A new resolution would insinuate that the invasion wasn’t legal in the first place (according to international law), and we can’t have the pride and power of the United States besmirched in that way, now can we.

We shouldn’t have gone into Iraq in the first place. But we’re there now, and so we have to deal with all the shit that comes with being an occupying power. The rotation of forces means that my cousin goes back in harm’s way, and I understand that it’s necessary so those soldiers stuck on the front lines now can come home, relax, deal with the post-traumatic stress disorders they’re bound to have, and get ready to go back in six months or a year.

But the Administration doesn’t get it, or doesn’t care. I heard yesterday that the power won’t be on full-time in Baghdad for upwards of two years. And they’re saying that the Iraqis have unrealistic expectations of what the U.S. can do. What the Administration seem to be ignoring is the fact that, unrealistic or not, we will be judged by the Iraqi’s expectations, and they will not put up with being powerless for two years. If we’re lucky, we’ve got a few more months, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

The Administration doesn’t give a damn about our soldiers. There’s evidence that the Administration’s corporate cronies have decided that soldiers wearing long-sleeved fatigues, kevlar, helmets, and patrolling in 130 degree heat need very little water, never mind medical science to the contrary. A couple or three bottles a day is fine, and so, apparently, are heatstroke, heat exhaustion, and death. Gotta keep those expenses down, after all. And just today, Rumsfeld indicated that there were still more jobs that he wanted to farm out to yet more profit-mongering corporations. Ain’t political nepotism grand....

I’d say my cousin is going into a powderkeg with a lit fuse that’s already 90% burned, but I’d probably be underestimating the serious of the situation he’s being deployed into. It’s probably more like trying to defuse a nuke ten seconds before detonation where you need to clip a single white wire out of 400 identical white wires and all you have is a dull spoon.

I was (and am) convinced that the first Gulf War was over oil, not over Kuwaiti liberation. But at least we had a valid strategic and moral reason for doing it, even if I don’t agree with the reason. But this war…. This war was over politics, over revenge. I can try to believe that it was because of oil, or because Hussein was a royal bastard, or any of the possible strategic reasons that have been proposed (by people outside of the Administration) for deposing Hussein. But I don’t buy it any more. Bush and his handlers ordered the deaths of hundreds of U.S soldiers and thousands of Iraqis because they wanted revenge on Hussein, because Bush the First was smart and ignored the chicken-hawks when they wanted him to push on up to Baghdad in ‘91, because they felt it would keep Bush the Second’s poll numbers up, and because a good war gives a President a second term more often than not.

And they may have ordered my cousin to his death. They may have made my cousin’s wife a widow. They may have just lost my cousin’s children their father.

I don’t make vows lightly, because I believe that vows are made before the Gods and Goddesses, the Elements, and the Spirits. When you make a vow, even if you’re alone, it is still witnessed by the universe, and making that vow binds your spirit to the universe in a way that nothing else can. And the universe knows when you break your vows, and screws you over accordingly.

The Administration just made this war intensely personal, and if my cousin gets hurt, I very likely will not forgive the Administration for it. Ever. I vow that, if my cousin is hurt during his deployment in Iraq, I will do everything within my power that I can do legally to hound Bush out of office. I was considering getting active in the Democratic Party for this election anyway, but if my cousin is hurt, I will become a thorn in their side the likes of which they have never dreamed about in their worst nightmares.

I had been able to keep the war at arm’s length. Not any more. Now they’ve gone and made this war very, very personal. They had better pray to whatever God they believe in that my cousin comes home safe to his wife and children.

Saturday, August 16, 2003

A New Kind of Sectarian Conflict

Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times wrote an excellent editorial that religion in the United States is gradually abandoning its intellectual traditions and migrating toward the mystical. As evidence for this migration, Mr. Kristof write that “Americans believe, 58 percent to 40 percent, that it is necessary to believe in God to be moral” and that “Americans are three times as likely to believe in the Virgin Birth of Jesus (83 percent) as in evolution (28 percent).” When this is combined with the rapid growth of evangelical and fundamentalist Christian communities nationally and globally, we may have more than just “another religious Great Awakening,” as Kristof says. Instead, we may be witnessing a transformation of the country from secular and multi-religious to fundamentalist and evangelical religious.

If history is any judge, such a transformation is far more likely to cause stagnation and regression than progress.

The United States was founded by deeply spiritual individuals who, for their generally deist beliefs (a moral, natural religion that denied that a Creator interfered with the universe for good or ill), were deeply skeptical of religious institutions. In the centuries before the founding of the United States, Europe had undergone deep religious conflicts that had repeatedly pitted Christian against Muslim and even Protestant against Catholic. Nine wars and a massacre in France had occurred in a span of 36 years, the Thirty Years War wrapped all of Europe in religious conflict between Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim, and Philip of Spain crushed Protestants mercilessly throughout Spain’s sphere of influence. And because the Founding Fathers were keenly aware of this terrible legacy, as well as ongoing religious discrimination, the First Amendment prohibits the establishment of a state religion.

These days, however, the history of European sectarian conflict is being ignored by the very groups who need to understand it the most. Whether blindness is intentional or representative of ignorance is anyone’s guess. The fact is that the modern evangelical and fundamentalist Christian movements (two related but independent movements) appear to be regressing several centuries to when Catholicism was True, Calvinism was True, Anglicanism was True, Lutheranism was True, and it was both appropriate and right to slaughter anyone who refused to accept your interpretation of Scripture as the Truth.

This regression can be seen whenever you meet an evangelical Christian who has slept around on his wife but didn’t believe that the adultery was sinful because he had accepted Jesus Christ as his personal savior. Whenever a Christian divorces their husband or wife, they are breaking the holy sacrament of marriage, destroying “what God has brought together” and thus sinning. Yet the divorce rates among fundamentalist Christians are as high or higher than society at large. And on August 14th, Judge Roy Moore, Alabama’s Chief Justice and the “Ten Commandments judge”, said in a prepared statement that “It is not a question of whether I will disobey or obey a court order. The real question is whether or not I will deny the God that created us.” The level of disrespect for secular government that this statement illustrates is amazing (read the article here).

One of the problems with modern Christian fundamentalism, and with fundamentalism in general, is that the movement finds Truth in writings that are hundreds to thousands of years old. The world today is totally different from the world when the books of the Bible were collected, and yet modern fundamentalists seem to yearn for those supposedly simpler and more black-and-white times. Religious writings must be regularly re-interpreted to make them directly relevant to the modern world, something that most fundamentalists seem loath to do.

Refusing to accept 2000 years of cultural change is the single greatest source of strength for the fundamentalists. But it’s also their greatest weakness. Fundamentalism appeals because it provides simple, clear-cut answers to every question. After all, if the Bible (or the Torah, or the Koran) contains the answer to all your questions and moral dilemmas, then your life will be dramatically simplified. After all, not having to think for yourself makes life so much easier. But the modern world is too complex for any single book, even one so full of good ideas as the Bible, could possibly have all the answers. Unfortunately, real life is not so simple as the fundamentalists would have us believe. Even a fundamentalist would have a moral quandary if forced to choose between the Commandment against stealing and the theft of a life-saving drug for use by a family member.

On the other hand, if you’ve accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, maybe there are no moral quandaries. After all, the sin of stealing described above would have already been forgiven.

I could certainly make the argument that the modern evangelical movement is inherently immoral and diametrically opposed to the inherently moral fundamentalist movement. Modern Christian evangelism states that your sins can only be forgiven by personal acceptance of Jesus Christ as your savior. The implication that far too many evangelists adhere to is that, by accepting Jesus, you are no longer beholden to follow ANY laws, not even those of God. If you’ve already been saved, then so long as you continue to accept Jesus, nothing you ever do will have any effect on whether you go to Heaven after you die. Thus there is no need for an evangelical to be moral. On the other hand, strict, fundamentalist adherence to the Bible would tend to make a person very moral – very likely paralyzed by the moral gray areas of day-to-day existence, but still very moral.

And we can’t forget that both fundamentalism and evangelism very nearly reject non-religious education. A fundamentalist rejects education because every question can be answered by the Bible. Exposure to new ideas just leads to tough questions that, inexplicably, can’t be answered by referring to the Old or New Testaments. Evangelicals reject education because all things come through Jesus, and exposure to the wider world of ideas might corrupt one’s understanding and personal relationship with the Christ.

There is a truism that I’d like to state – any system that does not progress and grow stagnates and regresses. And the modern evangelical and fundamentalist movements have a preponderance of regressive tendencies. How else can we characterize anti-intellectualism, acknowledging only God’s laws (or no laws at all in some cases), and an uncritical desire to find Truth in a nearly 2000 year old book?

As United States citizens, we cannot let this happen. If we let it, regression from modernity back to the dark ages of Biblical inerrancy and sectarian conflict will destroy the country. Should the United States remain captive to evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, the very foundations of our secular society will be demolished from within. It is perhaps ironic that faith may save us. Only those of us with faith, in ourselves, in our country, in the wisdom of a self-correcting system of government, even in our numerous and varied deities, will be able to prevent those with blind religious fervor from hijacking the country.

Perhaps a new type of sectarian conflict is inevitable. But rather than between Protestant and Catholic, this new conflict will be the secular and the multi-religious versus the fundamentalist and the evangelical. If the United States is to continue growing and progressing, there can be only one outcome. Anything else will bring stagnation and, quite likely, the end of the United States as we know it.

Thursday, August 07, 2003

Clean Air and Water are not Environmental Issues

Protecting the environment these days has become highly politicized. Modern so-called conservatives (also known as neo-conservatives, or as I like to call them, “right-wing wacko fundamentalist conservatives who are long on vision and short on follow-through") view environmental protections as against God’s will, a drain on the national economy, and a sure-fire way to increase the size of a supposedly egregiously bloated federal government. Modern so-called liberals (also known as left-wing Democrats and Green Party members, or as I like to call them, “wacko fundamentalist liberals who have great empathy for the earth but precious little for their fellow human beings") view environmental protections as True and Good, necessary even if they suck the life out of the economy, and if our taxes and government bureaucracy must grow to epic proportions in order to save every endangered ant species on the planet, so be it.

I don’t deny that I’m stereotyping a little. Thankfully, most people fall well away from the above extremes. While intellectuals can debate the importance of environmental protections on an abstract level, most people only care when environmental protections affect them directly. When a property owner can’t build a house on his or her land because of the presence of an endangered mouse, the Endangered Species Act stops being an environmental issue for them – it becomes a property rights issue. And when everyone in California must pay more for specially-formulated gasoline to reduce air pollution, clean air stops being an environmental issue and becomes an economic one.

The Clean Air and Clean Water Acts aren’t environmental issues, or at least they shouldn’t be. There are certainly economic costs to cleaning air and water, just as there are any number of issues related to mining, forestry, and fishing that tie in with clean air and water. But the Administration has made clean air, and to a lesser extent clean water, back into environmental issues, and in the process changed what should be an exercise in resource development theory, economics, and even public health into a lighting-charged political issue.

I heard yesterday that air pollution in southern California is on the rise again after decades of clearing skies. I’ve also been reading about how Denver’s air quality with respect to ground-level ozone is no longer meeting federal guidelines. As I drive to work each day and I look out over downtown Denver, I can see that Denver’s infamous Brown Cloud is returning. Seeing Pikes Peak in the distance behind the towers of downtown from north Colorado Boulevard is an impressive sight – when the mountain isn’t obscured by a disgusting haze of particulates, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid vapor, and ozone.

Denver’s clean air problems are largely the result of explosive economic growth driving a growing population. In the years since the original Brown Cloud, the population of Denver, and Colorado in general, has increased dramatically. As the number of cars on the road, gasoline-powered lawn mowers, and coal-fired power plants increased, they dumped increasing quantities of pollutants into the air. The same thing is happening in southern California. The pollution that hid the San Bernardino mountains from view from I-15 (less than a mile away) twenty years ago is returning because the population of LA, San Diego, and San Bernardino has outgrown the ability of California’s vaunted environmental protections to keep up.

So now we have an Administration that loosens the Clean Air Act’s requirement that power plants upgrade their smokestack cleaners because the required technologies cost too much. And we have an Administration that refuses to raise fuel-efficiency standards because the existing technologies cost too much, even though our oil dependence has become a vital national security issue since 9/11. And while the Administration turns an apathetic ear to public health and national security, we continue to get hints of what’s to come.

Clean air and clean water were never an environmental issue, even though they related directly to the environment. They were originally a public health issue. But the new generation (namely those 30 years old and younger) that is only just discovering its political muscle doesn’t remember serious pollution in Denver. I remember the Brown Cloud only because I’m old enough to have witnessed it as it was fading out. And so legions of people have no memory of water laced with lead or heavy with brown organic residues settling to the bottom of the glass. Millions don’t remember air that you could smell on a good day and taste on a bad day. Apathy born of a lack of personal experience is driving people to acquiesce to the rollback of some of the bedrock environmental protections of their parent’s generation.

If we don’t start working against the Administration and their allies who truly believe that the laws don’t apply to them and who don’t care about anything but their own personal wealth, our air and water will get far worse before it gets better.

We can start by raising fuel efficiency standards for vehicles. Not only will this reduce our oil dependence and thus improve our national security, but it will also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases, particles, ozone, carbon monoxide, and hydrogen sulfide (which becomes sulfuric acid when combined with water vapor) released into the air we all have to breathe. Cleaning up lawn mowers and other gasoline-powered tools, or strongly supporting xeriscape gardening that requires little maintenance, will help dramatically, especially with ground ozone, one of the most dangerous pollutants. Ozone in Denver has already risen to the level that it was impairing the breathing of healthy people, never mind asthmatics or the elderly. And as a side bonus, supporting low-maintenance landscaping in Colorado and southern California would also dramatically reduce both area’s susceptibility to drought.

We can also demand that the Administration actually enforce the Clean Air Act and require coal plants to reduce their air pollution. Building more natural gas plants would help with many of the nastier pollutants, but at the cost of more greenhouse gases. Building more nuclear power plants would also help greatly. Nuclear power is, after all, the cleanest form of power generation I know of that has a realistic chance of supplying the U.S.’ energy requirements in the near future. And yes, that means I’m one of the rare liberal Democrats who wholeheartedly supports the development and expansion of nuclear power generation.

Another thing we can do is break our dependence on automobiles. I love New York – it’s a dense metropolitan area that has one of the best public transportation system I’ve seen. Seattle’s bus system is pretty good, Washington DC’s is excellent, and my wife says that Salt Lake City’s bus system is also very good (so long as you have no plans to go anywhere but church on Sunday). But the Denver metro area’s RTD system is sorely lacking. Sure, Park-and-Rides are great if you’re going from the suburbs to downtown Denver or up to Boulder, but getting elsewhere that isn’t right around the downtown core is very difficult. And if you think that car-happy Colorado is bad, you should see San Diego. At least in Denver people understand you if you say that you commute by bus – in San Diego you’re looked down on because you’re apparently either misguided or too poor to afford your own car.

Population growth happens. Parents have children, people looking for an improvement in their quality of life move from one state to another, or from one country to another. Such growth is all but inevitable, and so long as it’s managed, growth should be supported. But with population growth comes pollution and environmental degradation, and with those come declines in public health and the overall quality of life. The only way to prevent it is to require that technologies get cleaner, and if necessary, to require that we change our culture to accommodate the future.

It won’t be easy, but it’s necessary if we’re to avoid a new Brown Cloud or if we want our children to see the San Bernardino mountains.