Huge Stupidity and Thoughts of Flowers
Ether St. Vying
preaching to my choir. She's a lifelong activist and author, and
gardener, full of fire and compassion. She's married to Stephen Lewis,
former leader of the national New Democrats. It's the most left leaning
of the major political parties. Its earlier incarnation was responsible
for our healthcare system and other social reforms.
So how many right wing articles will be fired in my general direction
for posting this unabashadly humanistic view?
I don't care. So there(!)
:-)
Ether
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Tiny comfort offsets huge stupidity of war
MICHELE LANDSBERG
The dahlia tubers — like skinny brown potatoes — are in the cellar, but
poking up into my
consciousness every night now as my dormant garden memory begins to
reawaken. Is it
time to pot them up? Are they okay? Will they be rotten and useless
when I unwrap them,
or bursting with vitality?
I don't like to think about the garden (or even look at it) in winter.
All its excitements and
burdens become too much by late fall and I'm glad to let it go under
the snow and out of
mind. Now that I've let myself get seduced by dahlias, however, this
winter forgetting may
be a luxury of the past.
Dahlias are the shameless dance-hall girls of the garden, flamboyantly
gorgeous. After I was hooked into growing them by their layers of rich
colours (rose, cream, raspberry, sunshine, wine, coral, peach), I also
got stuck with all the fall and winter tasks of shepherding the tubers
through until spring. As a recompense, though, I also acquired a new
vocabulary of dahlia types (waterlily, cactus, stellar) with which to
while away the minutes at the dark edge of sleep.
Knowing a specialized language is one of the privileges of any private
obsession. I've
noticed this enthrallment to lingo in other, less benign contexts. Note
how much pleasure
the commentators on the U.S. war channels get from mouthing their newly
acquired
expertise in ordnance. How lovingly they repeat the names of weapons,
planes, missiles
and troop divisions, especially if numbers are involved: "F-117s,
Fighting Falcons,
CentCom, 82nd Airborne, 7th Cavalry," they say, bobbing with eager,
boyish deference to
the retired generals who will explain everything. With each bit of
jargon, they seem to swell with the thrill of borrowed importance.
But even worse was the homey language I heard last week. A U.S. expert
was challenged
about civilian deaths in Iraq. He gave a comfy little smile and said,
"Well, you have to break
some crockery...."
It's my age, I guess. At one time, I might have been caught up in the
theoretical or historical arguments. This time around, I'm fighting
against a tide of feeling that is probably way too simple, and it's
this: The men who dreamed up this war and are pushing it forward and
making the decisions that will affect us all, for decades to come, are
stupid. They are so
stupid that they think human lives are crockery to be broken. They are
so stupid they
thought their tanks would be greeted with roses.
They are so stupid that they seem to think it's a shocking breach of
etiquette if people who
are attacked respond with "terrorist" acts in their own defence against
an army invading
their country. They are so stupidly arrogant that they can't even
bother to get the name of
their enemy right: They call it Eye-rak. They think they can stand at
lecterns and
microphones and sternly scold Iran and Syria not to "interfere" while
they themselves
invade and occupy a sovereign nation.
They are so stupid that they choose to send their own young people to
die in some distant
desert, and think it good. They are so stupid that they think they can
"win" a war, even
after Vietnam, even after Afghanistan.
There's some basic human understanding of the world and its people that
is simply absent
from these men.
That's a dangerous thought, scarier than thinking they are evil or
greedy, and riskier to say
out loud in public than almost anything else. It opens a pit beneath
our feet where once we
thought was solid ground.
Last week, sleepless one night with my fifth or sixth virus of the
winter, I resolutely turned
my mind from the dragging sadness of the war spectacle and focused
again on the dahlias.
Now at last I understand my parents, who confounded me when I was a
teenager because
they wanted to see only those movies that made them happy. Once you get
old enough to
understand sadness — real sadness, sadness that doesn't go away after a
good cry and some
chocolate, sadness that has no cure — you want to keep away from it at
all costs.
Well, you can't, if you're a good citizen: You have to pay attention in
your waking,
working, rational hours, and try to do what you can. But in the depth
of night, I forgive
myself for thinking about the real, small, distracting comfort of
beauty, and the magic of
taking something small and rooty from my basement and turning it into a
soft, bright blaze
of colour when the summer comes.