The Responsibility of Our Generation

author : Marco Rosaire Rossi topic : Iraq occupation

by Marco Rosaire Rossi

Every generation is faced with a responsibility, an event that tests the humanity of all people for that time. For our generation that challenge is ending the conflict in Iraq and working to bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East. No other single event intertwines all the crises of our age: environmental, economic, cultural. And no other region of the world focuses our attention more, whose future is more likely to determine if the world will rise to peace or plunge into a third world war.

It is fair to say the situation in Iraq, and the Middle East in general, has surpassed the confines of crimes against humanity, and has approached the level of genocide. The mayhem in Iraq, along with Palestine, Afghanistan, and the Kurdish situation in Turkey, demonstrates a loss not just of lives - but of people. Over the past twenty-five years Iraq has lost around a million people, Iran over a million, and tens of thousands in Palestine over war, economic sanctions, occupation, and collapse of infrastructure. Whole cultures, whole identities are being destroyed, perspectives lost, experiences forgotten.

Just as the magnitude of the horror reaches toward the worst of humanity, the magnitude of our hope for a better world reaches toward the best of humanity. The outcry from ordinary citizens and the international community has been the moral sabo clogging and stalling the machines of war. There is a growing sentiment that our technology has become so vast and our ecosystem so fragile that we, as a global humanity, cannot afford to rally against certain wars while fighting others -- we must rally against all war at all times.

On the eve of the United States attack on Iraq, President Bush went before the United Nations General Assembly and announced that his administration would attack Iraq with or without the approval of the Security Council. For years this had been the routine of the United States. For the empire, addressing the United Nations is a ritual -- not a legal mandate. But this time it was different. Millions of people around the world called the United States out on its lies, and took to the streets against the invasion. Never before had the call for peace been so united, and never before had fundamental questions of war and violence been probed -- even by those in power. As Dr. Robert Muller, former Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, declared: "Never before in the history of the world has there been a global, visible, public, open dialogue and conversation about the very legitimacy of war . . . This is a miracle. This is what 'waging peace' looks like."

The outbreak didn't stop the invasion but it did do three things: it forced the United States into a corner where it had to offer some token forms of international cooperation, it gave the pacifist/anti-imperialist perspective much needed limelight, and it threw an international peace movement into the streets -- and keeps it there today.

Protests in Spain swept the socialist party into power and forced the country to pull its troops out of Iraq; a protest in Rome against the war drew 1.5 million people; tens of thousands marched in London and played a factor in Prime Minister Tony Blair's resignation; in Athens Greece, over 10,000 marched on the US embassy; on one day Japan 150,000 took to the street against the war; in Iraq itself, hundreds of oil workers have gone on strike and religious leaders continue to rally their communities to find peace; and in the United States, the place were peace is most necessary, support for the war and the president have plummeted even among military personnel.

Despite the efforts of those in power, resistance is alive, and is working. City Councils across the United States have passed resolutions against the patriot Act, the war, and for impeachment; activist continue to risk health and comfort by going on hunger-strikes and getting arrested outside at congressional offices; and across the west coast, the military shipments outside of ports have had to deal with constant protest and civil disobedience when trying to get weapons to Iraq.

Underlining all this resistance is a renewed sense of democracy and citizenship. But unlike the liberal democracy of industrialized nations, this new sense of democracy understands its responsibility to be global, not national; its economy to be social, not private; its participation to be direct, not representative; and its creators to be common people, not elites. Gandhi often tried to shed the claims to sainthood that others threw on him. He considered himself to be an "average person with below average skills." He was right. History is not made by the miracles of geniuses or the schemes of people in power. It is made by average people with below average skills, by common people, by the masses of the world who are willing to be the harbingers of the future out of a sense of collective decency.

We are approaching some of the darkest times for humanity, but this darkness is not totalizing. There is a noticeable growing light in the form of the people's call for peace and justice. If we are to escape our own ruin, then we must realize that this light is more than a spark -- it's a twilight. It is for us to decide if this twilight represents the closing of a day and succumbing to the darkness, or the opening of a new morning and a new history. Our choice rests literally between universal death and a new paradise, and our responsibility is to find that new paradise.

Marco Rosaire Rossi, a regular contributor to Works in Progress and effective peacemaker, will soon leave Olympia to spend a year in the sunnier climes of Costa Rica. We'll miss you, dude!