war

Today it's four years since the beginning of the war. I remember before it started we all talked so much about trying to stop it from happening. We talked about how wrong war is, in the most abstract way. We talked about the stupidity and how violence can only breed more violence. We talked about how fucked up and racist an attack on Iraq would be, how pointless and deceptive and evil and how war would drag on without end and leave a sucking vacuum of killing and hate in the place where a country used to be. We didn't talk very much about how our cousins and ex-boyfriends and friends' friends would disappear to Iraq and never come back, or come back with broken bodies and minds. We talked about how everything that was bad in Iraq would get worse and how the United States would be left with the impossibility of reconstructing a country out of ruins and disparate factions. This is what everyone was talking about constantly.
We talked about all this, and we protested in the streets and yelled and screamed and shook our tiny fists at the sky and at the TV cameras. New York City filled up again and again with protesters and speakers and hundreds of thousands of people in the street were all saying the same thing at the same time and nobody was listening.
It was the only time in my life that I felt so unified with so many people, and so angry, and so certain, all at the same time. Four years later I feel completely futile and numbly angry and I can barely believe that our worst assumptions were so right, that this disaster was so obvious and predictable, and that it is happening anyway.