by Alice Walker
It is criminal, and immoral, I believe, to send our children—and nineteen-and twenty-year-olds are still our children—to fight and kill people they’ve never seen, never met, often never heard of. Like my brother, many of the young who are sent to maim and murder others like themselves may never even have glanced, on a map, at the places they are going. How like my brother these young Koreans seemed. Korea is just as far from Iraq—in culture if not distance—as it is from Georgia, U.S.A. Why should young Koreans die for an American empire that attacked Iraq in the first place not because Iraq had attacked the U.S.A. but because the U.S. intends to possess and control Iraq’s oil?
An enlightened rage is building in the peoples of the world and it is antiwar. Never before have we seen war so clearly: its horror and stupidity and waste. We watch, those of us in the West, mostly on television, unimaginable blunders of planning and strategy; we walk past our rapidly deteriorating hospitals and schools while reading about the ten billion dollars a day, or is it a month, or is it a minute, spent on war in what is obviously the wrong country, in newspapers that report this news, it seems to us, casually. We feel helpless in that moment, but we do not feel ignorant. That is a great gain.
It is bad enough, we feel, that our young, often poor, badly educated and frequently desperate young men are forced into war; they have few alternatives. But to see our young women, likewise disadvantaged, leaving their babies behind in order to fight—and sometimes facing harassment, assault and rape from their own male compatriots, in addition to the dangers and malevolence of war, feels like more than we can bear.
What does it mean to love one’s child and not be able to protect him or her? Cindy Sheehan, who lost her son Casey in the war in Iraq, demonstrates the power of grief. Holding vigils outside the president’s ranch and elsewhere, demanding that he sit with her; speaking everywhere, telling the truth of her sadness and exhibiting her fury, she lends us courage by her persistence. We have slumbered a long time believing the lies of those in power. Sending our children to fight those who might have been their playmates. And we know that those in power must spend a lot of their time laughing at us. Take a moment to think about how gullible, how innocent, we must seem to them. Moved about the world to do their bidding, like pieces on a chessboard. But in this time we are beginning to see and hear from mothers and fathers who assume the role of Those Who Also Know. The world is getting its Elders back.
Sit for a moment and consider what it means to be aware; let yourself feel the many ways you have been morally and politically manipulated and tricked. Consider your own part in this. Return to a place in recent memory, perhaps to September 11, 2001. How do you feel about the way events unfolded? What would you do differently if such an event happened again? What have you learned about “leaders” and “facts” and your own willingness to believe, or disbelieve, what others tell you in a time of fear and, especially, of mourning?
The world is as beautiful as it ever was. It is changing, but then it always has been. This is a good time to change, and remain beautiful, with it.
1.
Three Fates
Graduation Address
Agnes Scott College
2000
Some years ago, on December 17, 1996, at 7:16 in the morning, I witnessed my first birth. To see a baby being born was something I had wanted since I was a child and heard the mysterious information that babies came out of women’s bodies. Who could believe this?
I had been invited to this birth by the midwife, a friend of mine, and by the mother and grandmother of the baby involved.
I arrived at the birth mother’s home in the early dawn—the exact time, it seems to me, that one should be summoned. Four o’clock in the morning, if I recall correctly. As I mounted the steps leading to the mother’s door, I heard her cries.
This seemed as it should be. I felt—the world being as populated with humans as it is—that I should have been hearing these cries before. It is astonishing that at every moment a new person, many new persons, are being born. And that we do not hear this, so well hidden has the act of birth become.
The living room I entered, after removing my shoes, seemed ancient, even cavelike, as friends of the young mother sat about in clusters, quietly talking, or making tea and coffee for those just entering.
I was asked by my midwife friend to hold the light, and, as labor progressed, I was privileged to see each of its stages. The young mother was oblivious to all but her pain; those of us helping her were so attuned to her feelings that, during contractions, we instinctively panted and breathed with her. Until the last moment I could not believe that a baby would be the result of what I was seeing.
Four hours after my arrival, the baby dropped out of his mother into the soft palms of my midwife friend; in one fluid motion she laid him on his mother’s breast. It was a beautiful birth. The mother, only sixteen years old, had demonstrated an authority and courage that were pure warriorship.
As the birth of the baby was announced outside the bedroom in which it occurred, the men of the tribe—the baby was born into an extended Native American family—quietly began to make breakfast, which they served to the women who had participated in the birthing, and later to the clan of people who gathered to celebrate the birth throughout the day. I left this experience feeling blessed, inspired, somehow purified.
The next baby I encountered was in central Mexico, where I have a home and where I sometimes go to write. As a near, quickly reached, Third World country, Mexico is ideal for me because it offers a constant reminder of all that is transpiring in over two-thirds of the so-called developing world. This little girl was six months old when we met. I fell for her instantly. Perhaps it was the elegant baldness of her head. Her direct, curious gaze. Her scent of happiness. Not since my own daughter was born many years before had I felt such joy as I beheld a new addition to our world.
Her parents are quite well-off, and so she has a nurse and a nursery, her own pristine wing, located in her parents’ spectacular sea-cliff house. She has excellent food, beautiful, tiny dresses and piles of toys. She will be raised to be upper-class. This of course worries me.
It worries me partly because of the third baby I encountered during this same period. This was the six-week-old daughter of the woman who occasionally keeps house for me; a struggling middle-aged mother of three who’d recently married a man who convinced her to try to give him a son. On my way to visit her and to bring gifts for baby and mother, I pondered the baby’s future. The house into which she was born was as different from the previous house as could be imagined: essentially one room, with what appeared to be a dirt floor, in part of a crumbling building that rises very close to a dusty and noisy road.
The furniture in the house consisted of one bed, a table and a couple of chairs, all old and much used. When the mother went to get the baby for me to see, it was as though she rummaged among a pile of rags on the bed before lifting her up, which she did with pride. After talking with her for a while it became clear that her marriage was troubled and that her body was not healing properly from the birth. I urged her to return to the hospital, noting not only her lack of energy, but that the child seemed languid and weak as well.
The first child’s mother is too young and unskilled to take on the task of raising a child. Fortunately, the child’s grandmother is present, as is the native community into which he was born. This child will have many challenges, as a Native American, in a world in which much of what might have gone into strengthening him has deliberately been destroyed by the dominant culture. His primary obstacle in life might well be despair. On the other hand, he enters a community that is becoming ever more conscious of what it is, what its struggle to survive is, and also what its commitment to its own values must be. It is also a community that, in its essence, venerates beauty, justice and love.
The second baby’s parents, it seemed to me—with their baby’s spotless white nursery in a very casual and colorful Mexico—are attempting to sea
l her off from the raw poverty that exists ten minutes away. I dread the day when she awakens to her overwhelming privilege in a country whose children, materially speaking, often have little. I dread even more, however, the possibility that by the time she is an adult, the material disparity between herself and others will have no meaning for her. That she will walk over and around and through her nurse, the servants, and the population of poor Mexicans—as many rich Mexicans do—without seeing their condition of poverty, or even really seeing them. This would be a disaster in one born so beautiful and so inspiring of love.
If I were writing a fairy tale, I would say that the little girl born across the way, on the bed that resembled a pile of rags, might grow up to be the servant of the rich little girl in the sea-cliff castle who is nonetheless at this stage very sweet. The little rich girl, let us call her Hope, would resist becoming the spoiled snob I fear she might become, and instead she and the poor girl, let us call her Joy, would become friends so loyal to each other that Hope’s parents would not know what to make of it. Hope would quietly teach Joy everything there is to know about place settings and table manners; horseback riding and society dances. Joy would teach Hope all there is to know about card-playing, algebra, swimming in the river, and how to shop in the pueblo without encountering one word of disrespect. They would be mutually disgusted that Joy’s parents were so poor and Hope’s parents so outlandishly rich. They would plot, from an early age, to discover a way to equalize things.
Along would come, perhaps, the third child, now a fully grown Native American man, a warrior like his mother. He would join the two women. Together they would open a school to teach the children of the very poor, many of them indigenous. They would agitate for economic democracy in Mexico. They would be vilified in the press as Communists and chased out of town. They would take to the mountains. From there, they, along with the thousands coming to join them, would begin the second Mexican revolution. Perhaps they would model their rebellion on the Zapatista movement, ongoing, presently, in the Mexican state of Chiapas.
What will in fact be the lives of these children? This is the cry that must wake us from sleep.
Since you invited me to Agnes Scott College on this special day—the day in which you launch yourselves into new and ever more challenging studies of and endeavors in the world—I will feel free in giving you the advantage of my own harsh opinion about having children just now. I believe there should be a moratorium on the birth of children. That not one more child should be born on this planet until certain conditions are met. Perhaps the most important of these is that the several missing pounds of plutonium—the most deadly substance ever concocted by man; the inhalation of a single particle causes cancer—must be found. I believe it was the valiant Dr. Helen Caldicott who alerted us to the fact that it is missing, just as she has worked for over a decade to warn us of the lethal effects of nuclear power and nuclear waste. Where is this awful substance? Who has stolen it? For what purpose will they use it? And what about the information we now have about the use of plutonium in fueling rockets, which, as we know, sometimes self-destruct, scattering their fuel and the bodies of the crew over the face of Mother Earth?
In fact, in a recent article it was announced that NASA will launch something called the Cassini probe. It will carry 72.3 pounds of plutonium-238. Enough to disable and kill millions of people on earth, if anything goes wrong. Apparently the scientists at NASA wish to visit Saturn. Do you? A visit that could cost us our lives. A visit Saturn itself has not initiated. The colonizing mind invites itself wherever it wishes to intrude; it is a worthwhile practice for the coming millennium to train ourselves away from such a mind.
Begin, then, with tracking the use and whereabouts of the missing and badly misused plutonium. If we do not find the plutonium that is missing and contain that which is being misused, there is not much hope that any of our children will live free from pain into a healthy old age. Millions of them will not live at all.
From there, work to make the routine drinking of bottled water a distant nightmare. Water was not meant to be polluted, any more than human blood, which is mostly water, is meant to be contaminated. How dare we bring anyone into the world who must, anywhere on earth, run from rain? Native people have always maintained that water—like trees, rocks, and the earth itself—has emotions. Think how it must feel. We must learn respect for water and teach this respect to the billions of humans already here.
And then, there are the lives of the other animals—humans being only one animal, and a minority—to consider. These must be honored, freed from their cages, their lands returned to them, with our deepest apologies and most heartfelt reparations. I recently read about an experiment in which chimpanzees were taught enough sign language to speak with humans. One of the things they divulged was that they liked a movie called Field of Dreams. I have not seen this movie: what moved me was their enjoyment and understanding of it. I want children who are already born to understand that there is much to distrust about the zoo.
There is much work to be done, sister and brother Earthlings. But we have, if we work earnestly enough, all of eternity to do it. I personally take comfort in this thought. In fact, it is by working on these issues that an eternity might be ours. And I leave it to you to consider this, for a time in your life when you will sit on a green hill somewhere and consciously dream up a future for your very own child.
You will have children, the majority of you. Some of you may already have them. You will not listen to me at all. I myself do not listen to me. And this makes me laugh. It is such a classic predicament of human nature. Even as I enumerate the perils we face as a planet, the instability of every single system, the irresponsibility of an obsolete “leadership,” the lethal nature of “progress,” I find myself longing—hence my recent fixation on babies—to be a grandmother.
I say to my daughter more frequently than she appreciates: Where is my grandchild?
I am not wrong in this. I know how wonderful babies are. How much learning and growth and humor they bring. Babies come empty-handed, but bringing so many gifts! That is why so many of us want them. My own baby’s birth was a miracle from which I shall never recover. The way she felt and smelled—where in fact do babies come from?—will be forever a part of why I adore life. Life is audacious.
What then does such a mixed message mean?
It means consciousness about all that is happening around you, that endangers Life. The One Big Life all of us share. Essentially it means hard work. Our Earth home will be insecure and uncertain for many millennia. Despite our anxieties, we will have to learn to find comfort and solace here. Not by cordoning ourselves off from others, not by killing others or stealing their resources, but by learning to sit in council with them as we discuss what has become our common destiny on a planet nearly wrecked by the behavior of human beings. In this regard, it is helpful to witness the growing formation of councils the world over: of women, of elders, of grandmothers, of wise people who love the earth and look forward with apprehension and caring to the coming generations.
So, young women of Agnes Scott College, I salute your great accomplishment, that you have studied long hours in preparation for your graduation day. That you love the world so much you have taken the time and made the effort to prepare yourselves to serve it. Have your work in the world, and have your children. Only one, please, out of respect for the weight we are to our Mother. But be aware that the other children of the world are your responsibility as well. You must learn to see them, to feel them, as yours. Until you do, there is no way you can make your own child feel safe. And because when you do, you will join the rest of the world in cleaning up the rivers, clearing the air, saving the trees, and finding and containing every ounce of the missing and misappropriated plutonium.
What happens to the three children in my non–fairy tale will be largely up to adults of the world, people like you.
I have named the rich little girl Hope. The poor little girl Joy. I
will now name the Native American little boy (who became my godchild) Song. Here is a poem for them:
The Day You Are Born
On the day that you are born
Beautiful beings
Those who love you
Tremble
We tremble because
We are afraid
You are so mysterious
Beautiful beings
And we do not know
Who sent you
Nor do we know
Where you are from
Imagine how perplexed
You make us
As your bald (or hairy) head
Slides gradually
Into view
Between your mother’s
Thighs
And we hold our breaths
As, after so much pain to her, you casually
Drop.
What struggles you have already
Endured
Just
To get here!
How could we not
Welcome you
In awe?
Watching you emerge
Into the light
We wonder if what we see
Is even possible.
If we were religious
In the way inherited from our parents
We would cross
Ourselves.
And remembering that the cross
Symbolizes that place
Where spirit and matter
Meet
We might cross ourselves
Anyway
Out of respect
