antiwar: Sleepless in the Garden of Eden

antiwar: Sleepless in the Garden of Eden I do not write this for the long-time activists – no, not for you brave souls who have been fighting the Medusa of oppression in all its manifestations for so many years that it is impossible to remember a time when your pockets were not stuffed with flyers or a time when your eyes were not filled with tears. No this is not for you, although God knows you deserve an essay of your own – one that captures the million miles of pavement you have pounded or the innumerable rocks you have pushed uphill.

I write this, instead, for people like me. And there are a lot of us out there. Many of us started our journey toward awareness in November of 2000, and thousands of others have joined the movement in the ensuing three years. We are, by and large, a kindly, well-intentioned lot who have been slapped into consciousness by the repeated outrages, crimes and atrocities committed by the Bush regime. Depending on where we stand politically, we would like to see the whole lot of them removed via impeachment, imprisonment or regime change – and maybe all three (the order of events is unimportant). But whether we remove the Imposter-in-Chief via the electoral process or the judicial one, our failure to do so will have global consequences.

Yet there is another danger, equally as disturbing - and that is the one that might rear its ugly head should we actually succeed.

The danger, of course, is that those of us who are newly awakened activists will view this as an end to the struggle. It is not. The danger is that we will forget how this whole nightmare began and that we will just go grab our milk and cookies and trundle off to sleep. The danger is that we will go back to bed and forget to lock the door behind us.

The health of the world body, as I have come to learn, has not been good for a very long time. Those of us who count ourselves amongst the “baby-boomers” grew up in interesting times. On the one hand, there were bomb shelters and “duck-and-cover” drills and parents who continually linked our failure to consume adequate quantities of vegetables to the “starving children in Africa.” On the other hand, who could think about things like that when there were so many miraculous things happening? Television bloomed in living color, Disney was king and John F. Kennedy was president – what could possibly go wrong? ...