Sitting in Doha airport last Saturday, waiting for my third flight of a 30-hour journey, I read
this article, and immediately burst into tears. At first I chalked it up to exhaustion, to the peculiar effects of an airplane journey, to the strange coincidence of landing in my first trip to the Middle East just as my country steps back into a
never-ending mess of a military situation. All true, but it's more than that.
The war on Iraq made me a political person. I was fifteen when it started, studying abroad in Rome. We went to protest marches in every Italian city, hung PACE flags in our dorm rooms, lied and said we were Canadian to anyone who asked. We cut class and went to a rally at the Coliseum, chanted with Italians holding makeshift torches that blew ashes into our faces as the sun set, aghast with them at Berlusconi's agreement to send troops when 80% of his country was against it. I watched CNN International in the school cafe, shocked at what they showed on television outside the US. I came home and wrote scathing essays in my American History class, mocking the "PROUD TO BE AMERICAN" bumper stickers that popped up on every SUV. Proud to be American - as opposed to what?, I wrote. Iraqi?
My first year in college I worked at an indie coffeeshop, wearing a t-shirt with a red line through the president's face, making friends with the Eritrean ladies who worked 12-hour shifts there, chatting with the customers about "anyone but Bush." I was seventeen and a half during Bush's reelection, livid at being six months away from eligibility to vote, staging heated arguments with my father, accusing him and all other Republican voters of standing against everything I stood for. We sat on couches in the Barnard student lounge in stunned silence, crying at Kerry's concession speech, ashamed and embarrassed of our leadership. Not My President, we said.
And then 2008 came and Obama was elected. I stayed up all night in another student lounge, in London, watching the results come in. I cried myself to sleep at 6am in utter gratitude and disbelief. We'd come so far. We had a black president! A true liberal, a community organizer, who'd been against the war in Iraq from the beginning, who promised to close Guantanamo and ensure real social services and stand up for all those the Republicans kicked to the curb in their preference for corporate profit, oil money, global policing. My friends who were in New York for election night told stories of taking city buses in which all the riders spontaneously burst into our national anthem. I bought every newspaper with Obama's picture on it, put them all up on my wall, told anyone who asked that I'd voted for him in both the primary and the presidential election, that this was the first time I was old enough to vote, that I was proud of him and no longer ashamed to say I was American, abroad.
It was bound to be disappointing. He would never have been able to live up to the hype of how we felt reading his books, watching him speak during his campaign at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. Private insurance companies and the American right were never going to let him create a true public option for healthcare; Obamacare has been frustrating at best. He hasn't closed Guantanamo. He's only recently started talking about climate change. And we're no longer eighteen, stunned into believing that anything was possible.
Even so, how can we be right back where we started? How can Obama be sending "advisers," planning airstrikes, eleven years later, in Iraq? Because we dismantled a state and now have to prop it up forever, to justify the sacrifices and the money spent and the efforts and injuries and deaths of all those Iraqi civilians and American soldiers and everybody who loved them and worried about them? Because the War on Terror is real, and we're losing? Because Obama is just another politician, because Bush and Cheney didn't account for the consequences of their choices, because in the end the US cares more about being a military powerhouse than anything else? Because now we have drones, and drones "don't count," new war isn't the same as old war, we can just press a button and destroy whole villages, wedding parties, and maybe some terrorists while we're at it? Because it was all for nothing: all that political awakening and shouting in the streets, the mobilization of young voters, the reuniting of a disgruntled left with the concerns of the people, the forming of new identities of what we thought was good about being American?
