To the editors:
I’d like to elaborate a bit:
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Moral Superiority. The “peace” movement is permeated with it. A common complaint in the movement press during the Iraqi debacle was, “Why aren’t these ignorant, self-centered Americans concerned about Iraqi lives and welfare?” Well, in the most perfect of all worlds, your average Joe and Jane would be overflowing with compassion for all humanity, but we don’t live in that world. J. and J. know little about Iraqis, Palestinians, Asians, or anyone else from “other” parts of the world, except what they’ve absorbed from TV infotainment and an occasional perusal of the jingoistic mainstream press. They’ve been told that “those” people are the enemy, that Islam is a religion of butchery and hate–and they mostly believe it. We have to find a way to include J. and J. in the movement as they are now, replete with all the baggage of Western imperialist culture. We don’t have time to wait.
It’s time to say loudly that the same corporate economic forces pushing J. and J. out and decimating their economy are squandering billions of needed dollars in overseas military adventure. It’s time to say loudly that regardless of what J. and J. think of Iraqis or Iranians, Saddam & Co. aren’t the ones causing local factories and businesses to pull out and move to the Sunbelt or the Third World, taking tax dollars and resources with them and leaving the old neighborhood either a wasteland or a playground for empty-nesting urban pioneers and transient artsy-fartsies. The enemy, as usual, is at home, and needs defeating.
N. Leavitt
