What if heroes become villains?
I feel as if the world is falling around me
February 27, 2003
The Iranian
Boy it's cold. As I walk out of the Bahen center and into the blinding darkness of the street that's the first thing that comes to mind. A blind man walking with his stick passes by. He looks about 50, and has a nice beard. There are not many of those. With beards it only works two ways: either you look good with one or you don't. His gives him a soft distinguished look, like that of an old history professor. I see his stick going from side to side and wonder what it means to be blind. I feel grateful that I do not know the answer, yet I feel it must be a totally different way of looking at the world.
All over the place there's paper stuck to walls and poles and even to the ground: a dance next week, a lecture this Saturday, a play coming soon. For some reason the play reminds me of the recent horrific death of dozens at a Moscow theater. Who could have ever imagined? And then I remember all the chaos in Iran. All the talk of war I hear. If only the new generation would remember the mistakes of the old. But the fact that it never does seems like a law of nature. Perhaps Michael Owen was thinking the same when he wrote:
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. *
For now, all around me, the world is urging me to think about one thing: war ... war or Ozzy Osbourne. I read the last, most unfortunate newspapers of the day and watch Wolf Blitzer. I see the screaming child on a poster staring back at me.
Am I for this war? I do not know the answer. I of all people should be. I've seen my people bombed, my father's childhood neighbors slashed to pieces, my city brought to ruin by the very person the world claims to want to overthrow.
From afar it looks magnificent. Heroic men bombing the castles of an evil dictator and raiding the skies above, capturing him within days and leading the oppressed people of Iraq towards democracy and freedom -- everyone will finally get their say. Of course there will be death and minor losses of life, that's the way wars go, says Tom Brokaw on David Letterman; it's for the greater good of mankind.
Yet a nagging fear inside is what keeps me reluctant. What if the heroic soldiers hit an unexpected wall? What if they end up as the villains, like the last scene from Animal Farm, where men and animals could no longer be distinguished? What if things don't go as swiftly as planned? And what if, in the end, all of this is not for the greater good of mankind, but the pockets of a funny little Texan trying to play soldier?
And for some weird reason I can't quite explain, I feel as if the world is falling around me, and yet I am at that stage where I must slowly begin to rise.
I wonder if that's possible in a world where we can never predict the next minute. Then I realize I'm just acting stupid. Perhaps it's the Calculus midterm I've just written, and the two others that I still have to write, and the model bridge I have to hand in next week and the reverse polish calculator that is waiting to be written in C++.