Dan Fishback: Humanity at the root of the radical movement

My editor is making me finish this column on Thursday. But I have no idea what the world will look like on Monday. I'm writing to you from four days in the past, from a place where we dissenters are overwhelmed by the insanity of this buildup to war. From here, I could tell you so many things. But I'm in a time-warp, and my arguments will sound different after four days of protests, resolutions, speeches... The only thing that will surely remain is humanity, which is something we haven't been talking much about. I have this professor who keeps asking us to describe "the moment when [we] feel radicalized" by the movies we're studying. When we answer, I'm sure we all mean different things by "radicalized," but, for me, it's the moment when I feel radically connected to my sense of collective humanity -- the moment when the misery of others no longer seems distant. That shouldn't be radical, but sometimes it seems that way. In the effort to bring people into the anti-war movement, I've been preoccupied with these moments of radicalization -- these moments of humanity. I hope my own moment will still be relevant four days from now. Last October, before I really got involved, my entire world tipped over and started vibrating in shock. It started when Mark Crispin Miller, author of The Bush Dyslexicon, visited campus. He told a bunch of outlandish tales about American complicity in international horror. I was wildly skeptical, so I went home and checked out his sources. I corroborated his most sobering points several times over. I started reading more. Slowly, my entire worldview shifted radically, not to the left necessarily, but to the outskirts, or at least closer to the outskirts than it had previously been. Whereas in the preceding year, I encountered global insanity and threw my hands in the air, whining, "Oh, I'll never figure it all out. I'll leave it to the professionals. I'll just keep writing about things I already know," I now felt a responsibility to research, to understand more concretely what kind of a world I lived in. The stress gathered. And then it exploded. I took the train down to D.C. for a conference on the Iraq crisis. I was to spend two days there, and then shuttle myself up to New York for a conference about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. I was immersed in alternate histories, contradictory histories, pages and pages of names and dates and massacres. When I drove back to my parents' Maryland home at the end of a long day, I was on edge. I stepped inside, and my mom started talking about a new bedspread she bought. I snapped. "I can't deal with these priorities!" I screamed. She looked completely befuddled. I started shouting about privilege and guilt and responsibility -- how we're all implicated in terror, how new bedspreads make me shudder when freezing people on other continents are the basis of our luxury. My mom defended herself, flinging back at me a huge laundry list of ways she's trying to save the world. She cooks for the homeless! She's a gay rights activist, for Pete's sake! Who was I to imply that she was just some bourgeois drone?! She told me to calm down, to relax. She told me to stop thinking so much about these things, to give myself a break. "What matters most to me is that you're happy," she said. "No!" I shouted back, "No, that's not what matters most! That cannot be what matters most! If we all think that about ourselves, the world will self-destruct!" "I'm not talking about everyone else," she said. "I'm talking about you." I remember erupting at that point, diving into the onslaught of the argument. A blur. When I came to, I felt my mom's arms around me. I heard someone sobbing, choking, over and over again, on the words, "It's horrible... it's horrible..." It was me. I sunk into those words, and when I arrived at their core, I folded out and set up shop there. My sobbing swelled for a long moment, and then settled. I began to breathe. "It's okay, sweetie," my mom said. "It's okay." She sounded confused. She said it as a question. I knew that the answer to the question was "No," so I got on a train the next morning to hear more bad news. When you see people arguing about the war, there is a reason why the dissenters are more likely to get upset or emotional. There is a reason why the hawks are more likely to sit calmly and cordially. The will to murder, for most socialized individuals, must come from a place of detachment -- a place of abstraction. The will to save lives, however -- this will comes from a place of humanity, from a radical rejection of distance, from a place that defies Thursdays, Fridays, weekends, Mondays and all the lies told in between. When are you radicalized? When you refuse to let code phrases like "shock and awe" absorb the lives of innocent people. It's a war against words. And it will outlast this administration. Dan Fishback is a senior American Identities major from Olney, Md.

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