We were naive for trying to stop the war (we were right for trying to stop the war)

Twenty years in the life of a beautiful, holy, Sisyphean choice

Top notes

I’m sending this late on Monday rather than on Tuesday morning. I thought I would write a different essay this week (and send it on my regular schedule), but when I woke up today I realized that I couldn’t stop thinking about this anniversary, so here’s what came out.

Thanks, as always, to all the folks who chip in to enable me to do this work (both The Barnraisers Project and The White Pages). Have questions about how I think about the financial side of all this? I made a document about all that! The quick version, though, is that I appreciate every bit you can chip in, so thank you— for reading, for sharing, and for being a part of the community that keeps this little engine chugging forward.

I remember March 20th, twenty years ago.

I remember feeling so stupid that I thought we could have stopped a war.

I remember watching the troops roll into Baghdad: whooping and hollering, toppling statues, hoisting flags. I was late for class that morning: I couldn’t turn the TV off, couldn’t unstick myself from the couch, couldn’t move at all, really. People had already died. Many more people would die. But we were being told to celebrate this war, just as we had all learned to celebrate that other war, the one two countries over, the one we were being assured was a success.

I remember that to get to class from my house, I had to cross a street called National Road. At one point, National Road was part of our country’s first Interstate Highway System. By 2003, it was just a road— it passed a cemetery, a Speedway gas station, a combination Taco Bell/KFC, and a liberal arts college that hosted more than its fair share of bleeding hearts. Cars and trucks would sometimes fly American flags as they drove down National Road in those days, but that wasn’t unique to that particular road. The flags were flying everywhere. In 2003, every licensed driver could be a patriot, every private vehicle could be a tank, every street could be the boulevard into central Baghdad.

I remember crying. So many times.

I broke down when I heard a news report that stocks had soared to record highs as soon as the bombs started dropping.

I broke down when I came home from class and turned on the TV again and all the pundits agreed that everything was going so well.

I broke down as I walked home from a rally at our campus’ central grassy lawn— the Heart was what we called it, a lovely name. There was a vigil and we all held hands and a number of the students holding hands were Iraqi, Iranian and Palestinian. There were friends of mine who were terrified either that their families were under attack or that their homes would be next. We thought that we could at least pull off this vigil— a quiet, anemic, hand-holding affair at one of the nation’s most left-y, peacenik campuses (a literal Quaker school!)— without incident. We were wrong. A couple of bros in a nearby dorm saw us and pointed their speakers towards the windows and cranked it up, man. Outkast’s “Bombs Over Baghdad,” Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.” You could hear them laughing from three floors up.

I remember that just one month previously, we drove a caravan of fifteen -passenger campus vans to New York City. We skipped class and traveled through the night because we hoped beyond reason that if we shouted loudly enough we could stop the war machine in its tracks.

That weekend in New York, we slept on friends-of-friends’ floors somewhere in the vicinity of NYU. We dressed up in matching footie pajamas that we had acquired through a particularly transcendent expedition to Goodwill. Instead of cardboard signs, we wrote our slogans on pillow cases. We streamed into the narrow streets of lower Manhattan with hundreds of thousands of others. Our niche was that we did sleep-themed skits to entertain our fellow protestors — “guerrilla theater,” if you were being generous. Goofy chants, mid-intersection pillow fights, general anti-imperial goofing around. “Less War! More Naps!” “Bush’s Dream, Our Nightmare.” “We Think War Is Fool-Hardy/Let’s All Have a Slumber Party,” We got a lot of attention and cheers. We scored an MTV News interview. We stayed warm. We heard that millions across the world were protesting with us, the largest single-day global demonstration in world history. We were grateful, at least for a few hours, to not feel alone.

I was, at that moment, just a few months away from graduating college with the least grounded-in-reality undergraduate degree possible. Peace and Global Studies. I majored in a chill vibe, basically, which would have been fine if the world into which I was entering had any patience for chill vibes. A few months later, Fox News would interview me for a story about how programs like mine were stupid and dangerous. I had also just started dating the woman whom I would eventually marry. She wasn’t able to come to New York that weekend, which meant that this was my very first experience of going off into the world but looking forward to coming home to somebody I loved.

All this is to say, I wanted so badly for this to be the most optimistic moment of my life, the moment where I believed that the world could be changed and not merely mourned.

Even so, I remember driving back to Indiana through a blizzard and knowing that all of our efforts weren’t going to be enough. They were going to start this war, just as they had started the last war. We were naive for trying to stop them, with our silly chants and thrift store costumes. We were naive for believing that wars like this should even be stopped in the first place, for believing that the world was actually all that simple, for believing that less cruelty was better than more cruelty, that we should care for a broader rather than more narrow subset of humanity, that there was even an option beyond fear and hatred and the bottom-lines of those that profit from fear and hatred.

I wish that we had been able to stop that war, not because of the impact that doing so would have had on my capacity for hope, but because that war was an unspeakably devastating, impossibly death-bringing tragedy. Even by the most limited estimates, hundreds of thousands of human being were killed. There are some estimates that say “excess deaths” were far higher- even over a million. I take no pride in the fact that my naive, unpatriotic, bleeding heart take on that conflict ended up being vindicated. There is no joy in vindication. There is only joy in being more connected rather than less connected to other human beings.

One thing I’ve learned in the past twenty years is that a couple of decades can fly by much more quickly than you think they will. We have two kids now, me and that woman who I had just started dating back when the bombs were falling and the “mission” was “accomplished.” In many ways, this current moment feels just as lonely as that long, sad spring. There are still wars being fought in our name overseas, though the powers that be have learned to keep them quieter. There are plenty of wars on the home front as well. As White, cis-heterosexual parents, we are being told that these wars too are being fought in our name. Wars against trans kids and the “groomers” who protect them. Wars against “critical race theory” radicals who will defund the police that we’re told are our only defense against anarchy. Wars against “woke mobs” who “hate our way of life.” The drum beats are always pounding.

I have learned- over the past twenty years- that these wars will not disappear. But even more so, I’ve learned that the choice is always the same. There will always be somebody— a President, a CEO, a pundit, a consensus opinion—- who asks us to turn off our full capacity for care, to declare that somebody, in some corner of the world, is expendable. We will be told, in those moments, that we are foolhardy to choose more compassion, more empathy, more love. We will be told that we are putting ourselves and our loved ones at risk, that we are letting the terrorists win. We will feel alone. We will feel like our opposition to the machines of war and hate are Sisyphean. We will feel like our marches are meaningless and that our ill-attended meetings are proof of our wrongness.

All of that will always be true, and yet we should still choose the path of care, the path of interconnectedness, the path that keeps more of us alive and thriving. We will lose many of the fights, but not all of them. We will not prevent all the suffering in the world. But in the choosing, we will find connection. In the choosing, we will be more human. In the choosing, we will see more of each other’s humanity.

End notes:

Song of the week:

Do you know what the top country song in the U.S. was the week the bombs started dropping on Iraq? “Travelin’ Soldier” by The Chicks. Sometimes the world does its own foreshadowing, I suppose.

As always, you can find the collected song of the week playlist on Apple Music or Spotify.

This week’s community discussion (for paid subscribers): I haven’t decided yet! I’m open to suggestions though, so feel free to toss me an email before Wednesday morning. garrett@barnraisersproject.org.

Speaking of that email address, if you ever want in on the paid subscriber fun but can’t afford it, just let me know (no explanation needed) and I’ll comp you.