February 17, 2003

Dear Michael:

A bright, sunny, February day, not too long after you've left, not three weeks since I said goodbye to you and Lindsay after the play "wrapped," but it feels like months to me, and it must seem even longer to you. President's Day. Diane and I were supposed to go up to Orr Hot Springs for a much-needed mini-vacation, but a bad case of bronchitis for Di prevented us from leaving yesterday, as we'd planned, and storm damage to 101 N kept us from making it at all (having discovered almost subliminally, the way you do when you're "on the road," not an hour into our drive that all roads to Ukiah were impossible).

And so came home, almost happily, considering that Di is still more or less too weak for such a journey but wanted to try to go, anyway. Instead, we hit a matinee of The Quiet American at the Bridge, and now Diane is sleeping in the bedroom as it creeps on towards evening. Not sure why I'm telling you all this, but the film did make me think again of something that first occurred to me at yesterday's protest march, although I have had the thought, dimmer and vaguer, before at protests -- and knowing how ambivalent you always were about them, that we ought to be doing something more, or different -- namely, that sense of being a tiny cog in a great wheel, of wanting to float above it all and see what it looks like -- not just the march, but the whole bloody thing, the world, the war, the resistance movement...

Maybe it's just the nature of the way things are happening that makes time seem to pass so swiftly, to telescope in this weird way. A shuttle explodes in the sky, strewing debris all over the southwestern belt of the country... another "deadline" comes and goes, and the build-up continues... and then there are the more personal struggles,. the triumphs, the set-backs, the just plain exigencies of going on with work, with life, with love...

I want to know that what I'm doing is right, but sometimes it's not so simple. All of us want to simplify this whole war thing down to the same black/white terms that Bush proposes, only with us in the good guy role, of course -- to believe that it's all about money and oil -- which may very well ultimately be true, but don't ever discount the basic sincerity of Bush's moral stance. That's how he's able to strike at the roots of so many people's feelings and fears. Just as the "enemy" he projects in the Mid-East is his shadow, he is our shadow... operating along lines of subconscious fears and urges even those who are handling him don't suspect...

Or do they?

Dozing off just a little while ago, I had a dream-vision in which I was helping defend a watch-tower in a desert, and when I and all the other soldiers popped up to begin shooting, we were shooting at a vast mirror that perfectly surrounded us, and which shattered as we shot so that we didn't notice we shot at a mirror; the moment our bullets struck the surface, the mirror broke apart into "reality." The only reason I saw it was because I stood a little ways back from the action in the dream -- I had just enough of an "overview," what I lacked when I marched.

Of course, you might say -- and yet the profundity of the mirror was its very insidiousness. The devil convincing you it doesn't exist = the mirror convincing you it is elsewhere. The camouflaged mirror. The everywhere-mirror, as if there is nothing that isn't "I". Nothing that isn't a reflection of something else, and that something else is behind you, and different than what it seems. And so the reflection of me marching is me charging up a hill, firing an AK, pushing a button to drop a bomb -- and doing it not because it's the "evil," twisted me, the bizarro me, but because it's right, and I believe it's right. In other words, the shadow-sense that I'm the one who's deluded, to be marching, we all are, pawns in a game that's bigger and more complex than we could ever know...

Well, Michael, these are the strange kinds of thoughts that I've been having lately. Ultimately I must be anti-war, and do everything in my power to stop it, because I feel that it's wrong -- even if it turns out that I'm wrong, that not going to war -- or even altering it by helping to stand against it, by taking part in that collective "NO" -- turns out to be far worse than actually doing it. I must be, because the others who are against it seem so much more clear and enlightened than those who aren't -- damn the secret consequences and the strange reflections, the parallels.

...

David Hadbawnik

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