Real Hartford

Reflection on Rachel’s Words

March 16, 2008 on 10:14 pm | In Activism, Economics, Race & Ethnicity, class, privilege, media, war, not Hartford, anti-war, global issues |

I was born the same year as Rachel Corrie, the dead woman whose letters home I read at the Quaker Meeting House tonight. I am thinking a lot about parallel lives these days. Maybe parallel is not the right word for it, but I can’t think of a better one. When I watched Persepolis, I thought about how Marjane, only a few years older than me, grew up in a war zone. What I feel about this cannot be described as guilt. It’s more like awe. There are some overlaps between us, despite what would otherwise be lives defined by opposite sides of the planet. The punk scene seemed to interestingly save and alienate us both. Being headstrong and vocal got us both into trouble. Yet her adolescence was wrought with gender-based oppression, bombs, and just a generally stifling and dangerous environment. My run-ins with peers at school over pieces of my own identity were nothing in comparison. I never had to fear imprisonment for speaking out.

So, I have also been thinking about parallels to Rachel Corrie, someone whom I have more in common with. Besides being the same age, we both have the same racial background, grew up only a few timezones away in the same country, and were both exposed to social justice movements relatively early. While I was working and living in relative comfort, Rachel was on the other side of the world (for her, it was Palestine instead of Iran) witnessing what may be called an apartheid by some , and a genocide by others. She saw homes destroyed in the effort to move people of one racial/ethnic group into an area where another racial/ethnic group had lived for thousands of years.

Like Rachel was, I am an activist. I document what goes on in this world, which is a kind of activism because the mainstream media does not document so much as filter. We all use filters, but what most people receive as news from the major outlets is determined by agenda setting first and biased reporting second. I march. I actively learn about what is happening, whether it is convenient for me to do so or not. It is true that ignorance is bliss. But ignorance is still ignorance, and I can not permit myself to live like that. I helped to start an alternative food distribution program a few years ago. I do small things in my daily life. I have argued with authority figures when they have been in the wrong.

I do not stand I front of bulldozers. I do not behave as a human barricade. That is not something that I am comfortable doing. There is normally a degree of discomfort in direct action or in symbolic action. For instance, I thought long and hard about whether or not I would be willing to be arrested during an action. While political prisoners are not usually held very long (depending on the “crime”), bad things can happen in jail. But, I think that the risk is one that I am willing to take. I know people who have been arrested, and though the idea of it is not fun or romantic to me, I understand that it is not something that can always be avoided either. Having something petty on my record or having my name in the news does not really scare me. I am an otherwise law-abiding citizen, and I feel that while it may be illegal to stand in a street or block a doorway, it is a far worse crime to be murdering civilians in the Middle East.

Can standing in front of a bulldozer prevent destruction of Palestinian homes? I don’t know. I respect what Rachel Corrie did, even if she was a bit naïve, even if she counted too much on the white privilege (which she wrote about often) she had to keep her safe. I am going to guess that if I were to have spent time in Palestine, I would have found a different tactic. I think that literally dismantling the machinery would have been less confrontational and more effective; I say that from the perspective of someone who has not seen firsthand what the situation is, and who does not know how guarded such machines are or what the ramifications would be for such an act. I also know that I have always had a very vibrant and driving sense of self-preservation because I know that I am more effective alive than dead.
I don’t think that I learned about Rachel’s death until months after it happened. At the time, I was finishing up my few year disillusionment with activism and was focused more on academia and my friends. I had built a great friendship with a man who was (at the time) a career army guy. In part, our conversations (read: arguments) about foreign policy reminded me of my values. I don’t know what I was doing when Rachel was killed, but I was probably at work, in class, reading, or in a sports bar. A few years later I would see Rachel’s Words and learn more about what happened.

When I was asked to be one of the readers this year for Rachel’s Words, I instantly said ‘Yes.’ I had been moved by the performance that I saw, and had actually assigned the emails in a class I taught several years ago. During the first rehearsal, I remember how much the letters felt like a punch in the stomach to me. There was a section that I started to cry during, and which I got choked up during in subsequent read-throughs. She wrote about how appalled she was that this genocide, as she called it, was going on and so few people around the world were paying attention. But what really got me was when she wrote that this was not the world she had asked to be born into. It struck me—just thinking about it gets me choked up—because she was so thoroughly human, so horrified, and using such raw emotion to express something that should not be intellectualized and distanced from our consciousness. I can understand that feeling of living in a world so unjust that it is sickening. I understand how equally disappointing it is that so few people are doing anything to right these injustices.

I was worried that I would start crying during the actual reading. I didn’t, and I managed to not be too choked up during that section.

The other reader was a 16-year old girl that I’ve met a few times. She was a good choice for this, as she had more poise and understanding of the world than most people 5-10 years older than her have. Getting to talk with her was actually very uplifting after what was, in whole, a depressing kind of reading. It’s easy to be discouraged about the future when one sees many (too many) youth being apathetic toward politics, self-involved, or even hostile toward anything that challenges their ideas. Being able to speak with someone who is very informed, especially for her age, was refreshing.

After the reading, people were talking about the situation in Palestine, and there was an impromptu showing of a longer film, which I forget the name of. I had seen pictures of the fence/wall in Palestine, but seeing film that shows how long and high the wall is gives a different perspective. But, it is true that no amount of reading, or documentary viewing, etc., can equal actual experience. I can’t imagine going over there, and am making no plans to. Yet, I can’t ignore what is happening, what has been happening.

It’s hard to talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict because there are people who will dub someone an anti-Semite if she disagrees with the American-supported Israeli land grab policies. I don’t get how people can make this leap. Personally, I was very much thrown into Jewish culture growing up. I’ve participated in the holidays (more than spinning a dreidel) and some rites of passage. I was raised to be disgusted by the Holocaust, and am offended when anti-Jewish “jokes” or comments are made. And yet, I know that opposing the removal of Palestinians from their homes is viewed by some as being anti-Jewish. I think that Jews absolutely have the right to live peacefully, but this should not happen by evicting current tenants. In the United States today, I think we would be hard-pressed to find many people who would say that others here would have the right to kick them out of their homes, either by serving legal documents or by destroying the home. When it happens on the other side of the planet, I think we are so far removed from the reality that it becomes easier to justify.

We should not be ignoring or equivocating anything.
When it comes to violence, I think that if adults want to go at it, then I do not need to intervene. The problem is that violence rarely affects only adults or adults who are willing participants. There are children growing up in places all over the world where barricades, rocks, rocket launchers, bombs, and demolition are the norm. How are we to expect these generations to grow into reasonable, well-adjusted adults? And that is assuming they make it to adulthood. What about the others, the adults, who just want to live their lives without these petty battles over oil/ethnic supremacy/etc.? They get drawn in when their lives are disrupted.

I am left thinking about all those people I don’t know, who are roughly my age, and living their lives in totally different circumstances. It’s random that I was born here, in the United States, in one of the wealthiest states in the nation at that. Because of those circumstances over which I had no control, I have not worried about my existence being disrupted by tanks or bombs. In fact, the only time that thought crossed my mind was during the days immediately following 9/11/01 and years ago during the first Gulf War, when I was too young to understand (until it was promptly explained to me) that the fighting was happening entirely over there, not over here. But I could have just as easily been born into a different life, one in which I don’t get time to mull over philosophical non-violence because I am forced to make a very real decision regarding it.