Today is the first day of the Youth Media Blogathon, about youth and violence.
It couldn’t be a more fitting day to make our voices collectively heard: March 19, 2003 was the day that the United States invaded Iraq. Since that day, I have graduated both high school and college. I’ve written thousands of words and listened to hours of music. I have fallen in love– and out of it. I think back to where I was five years ago, and I remember how upset and frustrated I was because this country, my home was acting in our names to destroy someone else’s home. I was young, naive and frightened. I was too young to remember Desert Storm, but I remembered vaguely seeing reporters telling stories from a sandscape that might as well have been on Mars. For the first time that I could remember, I was fully aware of the terror and pain that my country was inflicting on real human beings on the other side of the world. I was insignificant. And I knew that the various demonstrations that I participated in– Walk-Outs, Sit-Ins, Teach-Ins and other protests that were organized around the Invasion could do very little to help. This was my place in history, and I was convinced that this Anti-War Movement I had found myself a part of was going up against some stiff competition. I felt my voice was too weak, too young and too alone to mean anything.
Five years is a long time. We’ve seen conservative cable news surge in popularity and we’ve become citizens of a near police state. It’s difficult to extract myself from the context of a young person who has come of age during this globally broadcast war, but I know that seeing people my age coming back home in body bags has given me an entirely different outlook on life. I remember thinking about how my life would be different if I lived in Iraq on this day five years ago. I felt guilty that I was relatively safe at home in Chicago while my government “shocked and awed” entire towns full of people with common experiences and memories. The language that was used to talk about war deeply upset me, mostly because the media made no qualms about constructing a cognitive veil between the clever catchphrases pitting “The Axis of Evil” against “The Coalition of the Willing,” the whole while glossing over the fact that “dead checking” left a lot of actual bloodshed in its wake.
Here we are, five years later, and the war is still sputtering on. Thousands of young folks have died in the name a country that never gave a damn about them; Iraqi youth have experienced the kinds of horrifying atrocities that most people wouldn’t wish on their worst enemies. I don’t know what more to say except that it really makes me upset, and it makes me wish for a better world for my children. If I’ve learned anything in these five years, it’s that one single voice may not mean much, but when there is a chorus of people united by ideals and armed with the desire to speak out against what they believe is unjust…that’s when movements are created. And that cannot be destroyed.
