Small Wonder

by Barbara Kingsolver

  We are expected to go along with this plan, in which people lose wars and corporations win them--the missile builders, the mining companies, the oil magnates, and that's just scratching the surface--and a little person like me should not dare be so insolent as to suggest a moment's time-out to review the monstrous human waste of an endless cycle of violent retaliation. Well, I'm daring. I have read that some of the missiles we are using (on the day of this writing) against our current enemy--one of the poorest countries on earth--cost a million dollars apiece. Excuse an outrageous suggestion, but has anyone considered just sending the innocent civilians the cash so they can dispatch the wretched tyranny in their midst and save everyone a huge cleanup? Masses of people tend to join cults of anger and vengeance only when they are desperate. History shows that populations with food in their bellies, literacy skills (women included), access to information, and immunization against the major diseases do not long tolerate martyrdom to the likes of the Taliban warlords or Saddam Hussein. And if those citizens were not grateful outright for our help in their liberation, at the very worst they might just forget about us--whereas our present strategy of asserting predominance with bombs is liberating some but starving others, driving millions to seek refuge in snow-covered, stony mountains, and ultimately sowing dragon's teeth of unforgettable enmity across the soil of one more desert.

  Arrogance is a dubious weapon--an inappropriate side dish, anyway, to serve with a war. In fact, the very word wartime invokes for me a much more modest cultural mind-set, and lately I find myself saying this word quietly, again and again: wartime. It brings a taste to the root of my tongue, and to my inner ear the earnest tone of my parents recalling their teenage years. The word speaks of things I've never known: an era of sacrifice undertaken by rich and poor alike, of gardens planted and warm socks knitted in drab colors, communities working together to conquer fear by giving up comforts so everyone on earth might eventually have better days.

  I went looking to see if I was imagining something that never happened. I found a speech delivered by Franklin D. Roosevelt on January 6, 1941, that made me wonder where we have mislaid our sense of global honor. "At no previous time has American security been as seriously threatened from without as it is today," he noted, as he could have done this day. But instead of invoking a fear of outsiders, he embraced their needs as America's own and called for defending, not just at home but on all the earth, what he called the four freedoms: freedom of speech and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from want. "Translated into world terms," he said, the last meant "economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants." He warned that it was immature and untrue "to brag that America, single-handed and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world," and that any such "dictator's peace" could not be capable of inspiring international generosity or returning the world to any true independence: "Such a peace would bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

  What reassurance I found in those words. I'm not an aberration, after all; I'm a good American, living in an aberrant moment, and I'm not the only one. When I ask around, almost everyone secretly agrees with me that we seem to be contriving a TV-set imitation--the look with no character inside--in our new-fab wartime of flags flapping above shopping malls and car-sales lots, these exhortations to purchase, to put down a foot and give not an inch. There's a rush on to squash the essential liberties of others and purchase some temporary safety. The four freedoms are not much in evidence. Faith and speech have taken hard blows, as countless U.S. citizens suffer daily intimidation because their appearance or their mode of belief or both place them outside the mainstream of an angry nation at war. Any spoken suggestion that there might be alternatives to violent retaliation is likely to be called an affront against our country. I have struggled to find some logical path that could lead to this conclusion--that is, the notion that ambivalence about war is un-American--and have identified as its only possible source a statement made by our president: "Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists." He was addressing nations of the world, but that "us" keeps getting narrower. If FDR's words were published anonymously today, especially those about force leading only to a "dictator's peace," FDR would get hate mail.

  It's true. In our hour of crisis, no modern leader called on us for voluntary material sacrifice. The entitlement to personal gain is now, apparently, a higher value than duty to our country's greater good; please note that the wealthiest among us who rushed to dump their failing stocks and give our economy a black eye were never called unpatriotic. No leader could oppose it. No one dared us to put ourselves in the world's shoes (or its bare feet) and share, at least to some extent, in its fate. No public official even pointed out that we could improve our security immediately through our own collective action--by turning to local economies of production and distribution for our food and other necessities, by conserving energy, by turning off the TV and seeking solace from a city or national park or the hummingbird in the backyard instead of a new pair of shoes made in Malaysia. What could be better for our country, including its own economies, than to ease ourselves away from a framework of international profiteering that's proving perilous for so many reasons? But to call for this out loud might rattle the unassailable right to global moneymaking. It might be called treason, or sedition.

  Such coldhearted values drive me back to my own faith as I mourn for the humane vision of a time that went before, and hope that vision will soon return to us. Freedom from fear, freedom from want--these clearly aren't meant just now for the Afghan civilians placed at risk of starvation. Our costly campaigns have put a notion of safety peculiar to ourselves ahead of any concern for the majority of world citizens who are starving and frightened--or for that matter, the hungry here at home.

  Life takes awful, surprising turns; that's no news. I'm aware that just thirteen months after Roosevelt's eloquent call to conscience, the War Department persuaded him to order the internment of Japanese Americans. (The War Department, it's now known, manufactured threats of resident treachery to stir up public fear and uphold the concentration camps when they were challenged as unconstitutional.) But history's griefs can't entirely cancel its glories; there was that January day--the speech is archived as proof--when an American president proclaimed the lives of civilians on other soil to be as precious as our own. I would have planted a victory garden and accepted leaner rations to further that vision of a kinder world, in which all hungers mattered.

  In fact, I'm planting one now: In response to September 11, a national network of gardeners has developed the means to devote a few rows of our gardens to the food banks that feed the hungry in our own communities. If our present leaders can't ask us for this sort of patriotism, we'll just go ahead without them. The public may expect fireworks.

  After Roosevelt's famous speech, Norman Rockwell painted the four freedoms; his Freedom from Fear shows two parents in a darkened attic bedroom, tucking two little boys into bed. To look at that image now brings my thoughts to two other children, one nearby and one very distant. As our war drives a population into refugee status, immense waves of new recruits are entering schools in Pakistan and other places where young men train to a lifelong vow of vengeance against America. One, somewhere, is just a boy, the age of my younger child. Today that child and mine enter new lifetimes as hater and hated, and the door locks behind us all. The pacts begun today will long outlive the men in Washington and the momentary popularity of this war. Do those men really believe we have bombs enough to destroy every storefront or cement shell in the world that could serve as a school for hatred, when hearts are so turned? If my country's leaders can't tap into a vein of compassion right now, I ask them to search out prudence. I am the parent tonight in that darkened bedroom, with my knuckle to my mouth as I look at these children. I wish to rein
state Roosevelt's plea for a worldwide reduction of armaments, "in such a thorough fashion," as he said boldly--yes, in wartime--that no nation "will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in the world."

  My parents undertook wartime as a submission to sadness, not an indulgence in glory. They were led through it by a man who spoke with a heart full of intelligent remorse. I wonder what's happened to leaders who saw enduring peace as a house built on right, not on might, and knew that the world could never be right until all its people were free from hunger, censorship, and the dread of bombs. I wonder where they are now, all the teenagers and adults of a great generation who threw their hearts into an era of living simply, that others might simply live. I wonder if anyone else is feeling the hollow ring to this loud new wartime motto, "We'll show our enemies we're more powerful than they are." Our enemies know that already; they've known it all their lives, as they trained to the careful, hateful mastery of the tools that the weak may use against the mighty. They can plainly see we are richer, stronger, in every way more capable of destruction.

  I would like us to show them, instead, that we are better.

  The end of innocence for America, and the dawning of a better time, will both be ours when we've come to grips with an awful, irrevocable, wondrous truth: The biggest weapons we'll ever build cannot ever really make us safe. Believe it. When there are people on earth willing to give up their lives in hatred and use our domestic airplanes as bombs, it's clear that we can't outtechnologize them. We can't beat cancer by killing every cell in the body--or we could, presumably, but the point would be lost. We have been drawn into a protracted war of who can hate the most. There is no limit to that escalation. It can end only if we can summon courage enough to say it can't possibly matter who started it, and then begin to try and understand, and alter, the forces that generate hatred.

  Horrifying enemies must be stopped, their violent plots intercepted, yes. But to write them off as unworthy of our study and comprehension is a pious and fatal mistake. Every step can be retraced. The terrorist network now known as Al Qaeda, with its horrific animosity toward the United States, has grown out of nearly fifty years of history. Many nations, and several multinational oil companies, have had roles in this morality play. The cast contains few heroes, many villains, and some genuine wild cards. After so much time, there is no possible system of accounting complex enough to determine genuine justice here; not everything can be forgiven or made right, and to suggest that the loss of innocent lives can ever be compensated is demeaning to life. Not all men of this world may be made to see eye to eye. But history shows they may often be induced, by mutual consent, not to put each other's out.

  This crucial passage to understanding must begin somewhere. And religious tolerance may somehow be introduced into every discussion in which anyone currently claims God on his side. Every culture has its pride and prejudices, to be sure, but any that claim to own God are forgetting He started out as a most ordinary, everyday celebration of universal human dignity. If we are tempted, even subconsciously, to absorb the shock of anti-American terrorism as evidence that the Muslim world is irrational, violent, and undemocratic, we ought to remember that same world first invented and gave us the scientific method; hospitals; paper books as an instrument of widespread knowledge; our numbers; and the systems of algebra and trigonometry that make possible such feats as the design and construction of tall buildings. Terrorism against the United States is unnatural to the Islamic faith, as surely as the eleventh-century crusaders were failing to carry the true spirit of Christianity into Jerusalem when they boasted, "We rode through the blood of the Saracen up to the knees of our horses!" God must be very tired, by now, of being dragged into godless assaults on human flesh.

  We should be tired of it, too. My country has been at war, secretly or openly, for virtually every year of my life, though my fellow citizens and I were mostly insulated from what that really felt like until September 11, 2001. Then we were chilled to our spines, and we began to say, "The world has changed. This is something new." We are right to weep aloud for this devastation; we should raise our forearms to the unsheltering sky and weep forever. But if there really is something new under the sun in the way of war, some alternative to the way people have always died when heavy objects are dropped on them from above, then please in the name of heaven I would like to see it, now.

  On my desk sits a small black-and-white portrait of the world in a new year, when the year was 1903, that graced the cover of Emma Goldman's magazine Mother Earth, and words of hers that have crossed a century to reach me: "Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty." Promises and prayers contain their own kinds of answers, as consecrated aspiration. I need this one now, as I need air and light.

  I don't know what lies around the bend for us. I'm as scared as anybody, and grieving already: the end of nature and biodiversity, of safety and the privilege of travel; we have such larger losses to ache for than the end of the SUV as we know it. We may already be looking at the end of the world, in the form we least expect. It would be a pure, hellish irony of history if the same smallpox germ that was let loose on this continent two hundred years ago by the European arrivals, which quickly killed some 98 percent of the indigenous American population, were to revisit us again with the same results. It does not seem safe to assume we will ever know the moral of our story.

  What I can say for certain is that many things will change for us, and fairly soon. We've built our empire on the presumption of endlessness for certain resources, which we are now running out of: more forests, more easily exploited oil, more economic growth based on more untapped markets for our goods. Alas, the nomads in Lorestan Province may already be buying as much Coca-Cola as they're ever going to be induced to want. "The time will soon come," writes Wendell Berry, great prophet of our age, "when we will not be able to remember the horrors of September 11 without remembering also the unquestioning technological and economic optimism that ended on that day. This optimism rested on the proposition that we were living in a 'new world order' and a 'new economy' that would 'grow' on and on, bringing a prosperity of which every new increment would be 'unprecedented.'"

  Every time I read an argument justifying further oil drilling in sensitive places, I notice that it begins with the caveat, "Unless Americans are willing to accept a drastic lifestyle change." As if that were the one thing that could never happen. As if many new kinds of shortage weren't already on the docket, scheduled for arrival, period, before my kids get to be my age. Scientists have been trying gently to remind us that the "fossil" in fossil fuel is not a metaphor or a simile. That oil is going to dry up eventually, and no political voodoo can induce dinosaurs or prehistoric fern forests to lie down and press themselves into more ooze for us on the timetable we require.

  The writing has been on the wall for some years now, but we are a nation illiterate in the language of the wall. The writing just gets bigger. Something will eventually bring down the charming, infuriating naivete of Americans that allows us our blithe consumption and cheerful ignorance of the secret uglinesses that bring us whatever we want. I am not saying I'm in favor of the fall; it terrifies me. I'm saying when the nine-hundred-pound bear gets all the way out to the very tip end of the limb, something's going to crash. Nostalgia for an earlier ignorance is not the domain of this discussion. Sitting here eating as fast as we can, while glancing around for the instrument of our demise, isn't it either. Would that the instrument might be a reconstruction guided by our own foresight and discipline, rather than someone else's hatred.

  To wage war is human nature, I'm told, and the only way to settle a shortage of resources. I don't buy it. There is Jason's swashbuckling approach to the dragon's-teeth warriors, and there is Medea's more intuitive one, and both--for the record--are human. When the most recent round of bombings began, my mother and I declared to each other, "When the going gets tough, seems like men reach for a weapon and women loo
k in the pantry." (My apologies, and deepest thanks, to you guys who were standing right there with Mom and me at the pantry door.) Slightly more than half of us down here on earth are of the pantry persuasion, and we didn't all of us get here by being efficient killers. By here I mean in charge of the place, numbering in the billions and wreaking our will on the planet. We got here by being social animals, communicative animals, cooperative animals, bipedal animals, tool users, seed savers, cagey mate choosers, bearers of live, big-brained young who seem determined each time around to outsmart their parents' generation, and frequently do. We are much too clever an animal, it seems to me, to kill ourselves now.

  This is the lot I was cast, to sit here on this sharp, jagged point between two centuries when so much of everything hangs in the balance. I get to choose whether to hang it up or hang on, and I hang on because I was born to do it, like everyone else. I insist that I can do something right, if I try. I insist that you can, too, that in fact you already are, and there's a whole lot more where this came from.

  That manner of thinking does not seem to be the fashion at this sharp, jagged little point in time, where the power is mighty and the fashion is coolness and gloom and one raised eyebrow. But still I suspect that the deepest of all human wishes, down there on the floor of the soul underneath the scattered rugs of lust and thirst and hunger, is the tongue-and-groove desire to be understood. And life is a slow trek along the path toward realizing how that wish will go unfulfilled. Such is the course of all wisdom: Others will see the front and the back, but inside is where we each live, in that home where only one heart will ever beat. There we have to make our peace with all we need of sorrow, and all we can ever know of the divine, by whatever name we can call it.