I'm not going to blog the war any more.
Linux Journal editor Doc Searls,
in an item headlined, "Peace
On," justaposes an excerpt of my statement with
with words from public radio host
Christopher Lydon,
I throw out the perhaps insanely cheerful thought that this could be the
war to end war. Meaning ... that the sole superpower has met its
adversary for the future in the stubborn, unintimidated, and close to
universal peace movement that has found its medium on the Web.
Doc then adds, "I tend to agree with both of them" and adds his
own sane thoughts.
Shelley Powers blogs as Burningbird,
one of my favorite thoughtful reads, although her writing usually isn't easy to fit into this news blog's pointers.
This time, in "Long Haul," she responds to my dropout declaration sensibly, and furthers it:
I can understand where Sheila's coming from, except that none of us can drop out of the war. Especially the Iraqis. Especially the soldiers. But Sheila isn't talking about dropping out of the war -- she's talking about not feeding the frenzy of pro- and anti-war rhetoric.
How does it support the troops to accuse others of being traitors, to make fun of people who disagree, to feed a constant anger? What's peaceful about a peace movement populated by people screaming "I hate you!" and throwing rocks?
Tellingly, in a later post today titled "Peaceblog no more," Shelley writes,
I have removed the Peaceblog logo from the sidebar. I'm not sure at this point exactly what a peaceblog is. After three difficult days of thinking, I'm not sure what 'peace' is.
Good stuff.
Fellow journalists Dan Gillmor and J.D. Lasica also point to my dust, for which I am grateful.
Finally, thanks to reader Carol Williams for the email whose subject is simply, "Good for you."
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Wi-Fi: Anytime, Anywhere: Number Of Wi-Fi Hot Spots Set To Explode, Bringing Wireless Technology To Rest Of Us
This is Monday's Wall Street Journal report, freely available at Yahoo. The link above is Part 1; here's part 2. via Wi-Fi Networking News.
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Can Saddam's desert be a Garden of Eden again? From the Guardian (UK):
When Azzam Alwash was a boy he went duck-hunting with his father on the Mesopotamian marshes. They took an old wooden boat and rowed south from his home in Nasiriyah into one of the largest wetlands in the world – the land of the Marsh Arabs, which some believe is the origin of the story of the Garden of Eden.
This week, watching TV images of the battle for Nasiriyah from his new home in California, Alwash wonders at the different landscape. "I look at the pictures of the bridges over the Euphrates. All the land behind used to be endless bullrushes and reedbeds stretching for hundreds of miles. But now there is nothing green. It is totally gone," he says.
The difference is Saddam Hussein. After the 1991 Gulf War he drained most of the marshes and diverted the Tigris and Euphrates, the two great rivers that once watered them. It was an epic work of destructive civil engineering that turned the ecological jewel of the Middle East into a scrub desert and drove out most of the 50,000 Madan, or Marsh Arabs, who had joined the abortive post-war uprising against him in 1992.
Alwash, who is, like his father, a civil engineer, would probably have had to work on the draining if he hadn't left for the US in the late 1970s. But now he has plans to bring back the landscape of his childhood.
Related: “Garden of Eden” in Southern Iraq Likely to Disappear Completely in Five Years Unless Urgent Action Taken a United Nations Environment Programme release.
Beni Hassan Village Weavers of Iraq: From Oriental Rug Review.
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Streaming Internet Radio In Your Car: Illustrated.
The PSB Gallery of Thrift Store Art: Scroll down to see the latest "acquisitions." via Judy Watt.
April 1, 2003
I'm dropping out of the war: Last night, I took a longer look at the "Peaceblogroll" that got added to the Best sources portal yesterday. Some of these blogs turn out not to be "peace blogs" at all -- they're part of the pissing match.
War plus anti-war does not equal peace.
Pro-war and anti-war blogs are two sides of the same coin. War and anti-war fight each other with hearts and minds and furious typing.
On the streets, anger fuels protest, and is met with anger.
The potential for tearing our country apart again is already shaping up: "Support the war, support the troops" vs. "Support the troops -- Bring them home."
Spammers want to sell me a flag.
Salon today has three stories that work together to address our domestic dilemma. (They're well worth quickly clicking through the ad to get a free day pass):
"Why is my country turning against me?"
Linda Johnson, a 40-something woman in faded jeans and Birkenstocks:
..."I'm from the Vietnam era. I don't necessarily believe in war. Many soldiers and their families don't necessarily believe this war is right," Johnson adds, reaching for more tissues. "However, at this point, our soldiers feel they're protecting our country from terrorists. And that they eventually will bring freedom to the Iraqi people. We have to support them and say prayers for them."
"For no good reason":
Military families who oppose the war in Iraq say there's a special horror in watching this campaign unfold. Like everyone else who has a relative serving in the Gulf, they're beset by a sickening anxiety that builds as the troops move toward Baghdad -- and that paralyzes them every time another casualty is reported. For those who believe the war is unjust, though, there's no pride in a righteous cause to ease the terror, no patriotic sense of shared sacrifice to make sense of their families' disruptions. There is just the helpless feeling that their loved ones might lose their lives for nothing.
Some of them have started a website, Military Families Speak Out.
Here's what I hope will be the last war story on this blog:
Talking to the enemy. Philip Robertson interviews Iraqi POWs:
A third Iraqi prisoner wants to testify about the American bombing runs where he was stationed. "The airplanes were flying very low over our position and it was very easy for them to kill us, but they did not. They were so close we could see the pilots. We understood that it was a message and it was a warning for us. The message was, 'We don't want to kill you. Run away.'"
"We don't want to kill you." Peace starts there.
I'm dropping out of the war. I don't want war in my living room any more. I don't want to give it my attention. I can't stop it, can't change it, won't fight it. All I can do is live as peacefully as I can, without sucking in its virtual fumes.
I'll still maintain the war news portal to make it easier for you to inform yourself, if and when you choose to, but I don't want to blog war no more.
Starting tomorrow, I'm going to dig through and under the words of war weighing down the web and find what's good and buried there, bringing the best of it to light.
Peace.
http://www.projo.com/cgi-bin/include.pl/blogs/shenews/archives/weekfiftyone.htm#nowar
