A High School Student's Perspective on the War on Terror (Circa 2002)

(Just a recently rediscovered piece of work I turned out back in Grade 12, many years ago now).

For the average student, such as myself, locked within the confines of the education system with no hope of escape, it’s often hard to picture what is really going on in that great wide world outside the warm and fuzzy enclosed spaces we call classrooms.

To the average student (or any kid for that matter, student or no) – as in touch with the world as we are (or at least as much as the Internet developers dreamed) – the “War on Terror” proposed by some president sitting in a far away house that just so happens to be white against so fanatical terrorist zealots and their “president” who apparently blew away a couple of sizable office buildings seems almost like a video game (an analogy only someone in this digital age could come up with).

Remember those old Mortal Combat Nintendo games? Those classic pieces of video technology where the winner of the game often didn’t just take the loser’s pride but his entire head and spinal cord as well (in addition to dicing up his body, throwing it into a spike-filled pit, corroding it with acid and all manner of other spectacular means of desecrating the recently deceased)! Well, it only seems fitting – given our digital violence charged psyches – that we see this “War on Terror” as an intriguing (and suitably lethal) Mortal Combat sparring match between “Captain America” and “Angry Arab” with all the pretentious amounts of blood and gore that make it such a good show.

Canada Day False Reassurance

Only days after the mass arrests and beatings that featured in the police crackdown that surrounded the G20 Summit in Toronto, the Queen addresses cheering crowds on Canada Day with a feel-good message that all is well and that Canada is a shining example for the world – exactly what the people want to hear in these uncertain times of war and economic uncertainty and exactly why they still look to an 84 year old woman for semi-divine guidance.

Now the debacle of the G20 can be blamed on a few despicable anarchist morons, the country can go on as normal with its supposedly sacred mission in Afghanistan, its supposedly profitable tar sands showpiece oil industry, its sure to come economic austerity programs, its manipulative Prime Minister, its star hockey team, its down home celebrity singers and figure skaters and its tame gospel of multiculturalism which conveniently ignores the third world living conditions that persist not only on native reserves but in our inner cities and countryside alike – not to mention its ancient draconian anti-sabotage laws from 1939 that can be revived secretly to deal with troublesome dissenters. This was a day of Tim Hortons, monarchy, street hockey, and endless patriotic protestations of innocence by guilty politicians – the inconvenient 2000 protestors who marched in Toronto under heavy police guard were dwarfed by the 100,000 strong mass of flag waving people swarming Parliament Hill.

Too many choose to remain blind and cling to myths rather than face up to harsh realities. Stephen Harper has washed his hands clean of the G20, left any after effects for the Province of Ontario and the City of Toronto to deal with, and taken sweet refuge amid royal pageantry and tradition. The lessons of the past week are telling: There will only be justice in this land, and we will only be a truly “shining example” for the world when 100,000 people throng downtown Toronto to protest against injustice in solidarity with their fellow citizens and a mere 2,000 show up on Parliament Hill to stare at royalty.

One World, Two Humans

From the waves that drew you across the ocean to my gaze across a crowded room, a globalized world drew together two children.  Eyes met: stepping out of time and space and defying gravity itself as the power of the human spirit worked its magic.

Every variable was thrown to the winds as two lips met across a thousand years, across the land and over the seas.

Our embrace would envelop the world and encompass all of life within our enfolding arms.  Our minds and bodies smarted with the realization that the world truly is one and in Gaia’s blood flow its guardians: the woman and the man.  We were becoming.

The 7th Brother

I suppose I am like the 7th Chinese Brother: whom his brothers always tried to keep happy and smiling because his great salt tears could drown whole villages.  All the tears that I had shed for humanity, for this world, for you, by all rights there should be no dry land left.

I have never shed so many tears for one person.  Tonight I felt that I could outcry even the 7th Brother himself: drowning the world in a deluge of my own making.  For a moment even my age old faith in the invincibility of the human spirit slipped and in my horror I said, “Oh God, she’s really going to break – for Christ’s sake stop writing! I don’t want to see this!”

I could picture my tears flooding the streets and sweeping Guelph away: down the Speed River, into the Great Lakes, over Niagara Falls and down the St Lawrence River into the ocean where it would sink like a modern Atlantis beneath the waves.

Call to Arms

I can no longer hide.  I’m at war.  From the moment I came into this world, kicking and screaming like a geological upheaval made breath and skin, I WAS BORN TO STRUGGLE.

Eleven years ago I first heard the call to arms: I was fourteen years old, a boy, too young to fight, but humanity’s need for soldiers was great and my summons was clear.  IN THAT MOMENT I knew my childhood days were done.  My family was no longer my family; my home was no longer my home: I entered into war as a newborn enters the world: My second birth burning my weak and childlike skin, shaping it into something new.  I CHANGED - like steel from the furnace I was shaped, hammered, and sharpened until age-old lies split before me like a chopping block splits under an axe blade.  Innocence withered and died as the scales fell from my dark eyes.

Bad Dreams

All this pain, divided and alone, we stand apart like so many battered monoliths on a featureless plain under threatening stormy skies.  It reminds my tortured brain of a dream that terrified me as a child and haunts my memories to this day.

I would see three prisoners: a man, a woman, and a child – all one family – and each of them in turn would be locked in their cells with walls of concrete and steel sealing them away from their incarcerated loved ones.

I can only remember the look on the man’s face – the deepest expression of pain I have ever witnessed, as though his world was disintegrating around him.  The look of a man trapped in hell, guilty and alone.

I couldn’t see the guards except for their hands as they went to each cell, looked into the faces of their terrified prisoners, and said to each of them two terrifying words “no light”.

What followed was always the same: the guard would reach through the bars and blindfold the prisoner within, plunging each of their rapidly contracting worlds into darkness.  Confined, blinded, and alone.

For two decades I have feared those images.  Images no young boy should rightfully have dreamt.  Already the nature of the society I was entering was coming clear through dark whisperings and the peculiar feeling that something just wasn’t right.

Nightmares always lingered on the very edges of my vision, as if daring me to build a force, a love, defiant enough to free those people.

My fight had just begun.

The Living Citadel

“Troops in desperate straits know no fear. Where there is no escape, they stand firm; when they have entered deep, they persist; when they see no hope, they fight.”
- Sun-Tzu, The Art of War, pp 74

As I stand now my back is pressed against a wall and before me a panorama opens before my eyes: I see soldiers, American, Canadian, British, French, German – all the countries of the NATO alliance backed by Israelis, Ethiopians, Colombians, Mexicans, Filipinos, soldiers and security forces from every continent and behind them all I see their leaders – Bush, Cheney, Olmert, Netanyahu, Karzai, Zardari, Singh, Brown, Sarkozy, McCain, Obama, looking out I think I see even Donald Rumsfeld chuckling away off in a corner.