I finally started on the current selection (Small Wonder by Barbara Kingsolver) for my book club in an attempt to finish it before we get together next week. One of my fellow members finished it weeks ago and has been itching terribly to discuss it, but the rest of us were so busy with the end of the semester we couldn't even THINK about starting it until now (incidentally, I managed by the grace of the gods to pull an A in my history class). I just finished the first essay in the book, but it took me a while because I kept having to stop and just breathe before I could continue. Kingsolver began this collection of essays on 12 September 2001, I imagine as a way to help herself come to terms with the tragedy. The scary part is that she cautioned against so many thought patterns that have come to pass since she published the book in late 2002. I wish I could articulate my feelings about the essay as well as she articulates her feelings in the essay.

One major theme running through the piece is a sense of helpless fury at the way the world is behaving. It seems we can only sit by and watch the world crumble to bits. Sure, we can join a war protest, but does anyone really listen? The news is full of polls, and one of their most popular for a while stated a MAJORITY OF AMERICANS SUPPORT THE WAR IN IRAQ, but they seldom, if ever, mention that it is a small majority. The destruction of lives and environment depresses me so much that I can't even watch TV channels that show news without feeling my heart rate and blood pressure skyrocket. In fact, whenever possible, I don't watch the news just so anxiety doesn't keep me awake at night. I am well aware that these feelings aren't new, that people facing the Vietnam War and the Korean War and World Wars Two and One and even the Civil War and the Revolutionary War experienced a sense of anxiety, but what I have to ask myself is why no one seems to be learning anything. They say that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, so what is the point of our elders making us study American and world history, and us making our children study American and world history, if no one is going to pay a damned bit of attention to any of it and try to find a better way? I worry at this conundrum and worry at it to the point that I can empathize with Kingsolver's daughter's reply to learning that the war in Afghanistan was still occurring when she came home from kindergarten one day -- "If people are just going to keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born." I don't agree with her, but I understand that poor little girl's frustration. We're taught from the time we can remember that fighting is no solution to a problem, that we should try to talk about and reason out our troubles, not bully others into doing what we want. I guess those rules fly out the window when we hit adulthood or gain a political office. No wonder our children are confused and don't know how to behave.

Believe me, I'm as surprised as the next guy at the "pacifist" I seem to have become. I always got angry when growing up when I still heard, even in the mid to late 1980s, Vietnam vets called baby killers. I didn't think twice about America's reasoning when Bush I went to war with Iraq in the early 1990s; I just hoped it didn't last long enough for the draft to be instated because my "brother" was of age to go if that happened. I'm still trying to determine why this war bothers me so much when those others didn't. Maybe it's because I'm older and take more notice of what happens in the world. Maybe at almost 32 years old I don't take everything I see and hear at face value like I did when I was 20 or 21. As an eternal student, I've met a lot of people from many different countries, and I've begun to see more similarities than differrences among us all. I saw the Middle Eastern students on my campus mourning 9/11 next to the American students, holding up Old Glory and trying to make this small part of the world understand that the people who committed that atrocity were no more representative of their religion than the KKK is representative of Christianity.

There are only a handful of people I can discuss this with because my entire family are Bush II supporters. I feel some days as though I am drowning. I feel some days as though I'm floating in a sea of blind hatred, and I just want to scream at the sky, "Why can't we all just get along?"

Like Kingsolver, I find a bit of solace in the nature around me. The male cardinal sitting on top of the wind tunnel building has the ability to make me smile a little with his song. I can actually laugh out loud at the squirrel who cusses me out for walking my dog Reba under his tree, interrupting his evening supper. I couldn't ignore even if I wanted to the positive energy that sang along my every nerve ending this morning as I walked Reba after a rain shower. I breathed deeply the clean, renewed air, and I could almost convince myself that a world that felt that good at 7:45 a.m. couldn't possibly be resounding with hatred and bullets somewhere else. I could feel my tension being taken out of my neck and shoulders by the light breeze, bless her for her gift. With that renewed sense of vision, with some of the anguish taken away, I can read with clearer eyes the words of Kingsolver when she says that sometimes I can only worry about my immediate world. That is often the only place I can truly make a difference, but it can be enough.