Kyiv on a winter night without bombs.©Peter Zalmayev with permission
It's strange that the world would allow this to happen to us.
-a Gaza survivor
The huge death toll led soldiers less to question the purpose of the war than to feel deeper solidarity with those who endured it with them.
-Adam Hochschild, To End All Wars: A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918
The Russian bombing in Kyiv has intensified this week and I've been worrying about Ukrainian friends still working in the city. The fighting in Sudan has eased somewhat and the truce between India and Pakistan is holding, for now. The Israeli bombing of civilians in Gaza continues. And it's Memorial Day today in the United States as I write; we are honoring our soldiers, those who were killed, and those who survived. The day demands different music, not my usual John Coltrane or Keith Jarrett, but Beethoven or Bach's B Minor Mass. And a long walk and talk in the sunshine with friends.
I once asked my Neo-Freudian psychoanalyst mother, a refugee from a genocide, if she thought that war and its preamble—hatred and violent aggression—is baked into our DNA. Freud believed that the commandment, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" is all the evidence we need: we descend from murderers whose love of murder was in their blood. Our unconscious does not believe in its own death and we act as though we are immortal. A UN worker I know agrees with this assessment of the human species as fatalistically war mongering. But he has seen too many wars, and the consequences of those wars. Several former soldiers I know have segued to humanitarian work after their deployments. What explains their choice?
My husband was in the US Navy—the Seventh Fleet—but bristles when he hears, "Thank you for your service." He was on active duty two years and in the reserves for six. In boot camp, he had difficulty obeying orders without questioning those orders, not his place as an enlisted man. He was too young and too undereducated to understand geopolitics, the military-industrial complex, or American foreign policy. But he was, somehow, resisting military swagger. I am grateful he did not see combat. Instead, he saw the world. On his ship—at sea for two years—he befriended Americans from the heartland, young men he never would have met otherwise. Perhaps all high school graduates should serve in the military, or a domestic Peace Corps, to broaden hearts and minds.
I refuse to lose hope in the possibility of ceasefires between warring nations, within nations, and within this nation where I was born and raised. I refuse to lose hope in the evolution of the American sub-species. Though we have devolved in our current iteration, the opportunity to evolve as a people, as a nation, lies before us, beckoning.