Who could possibly be against this? Why, most of the world is against this. Surely you've read the papers?

I remember the evening of 9/11/2001. I hadn't yet been able to contact my father and as a result I wasn't sure if he'd been killed. He had recently retired from a job at the Pentagon, but was still going in quite often to help with staff transitions and the like. It put me in a strange state of mind - his job often boils down to killing people, and making that easier, when you get right down to it, and often for reasons I (and many other citizens) don't consider legitimate. It's part of a giant system, and while many on the bottom never really get told exactly what the Big Picture is all about, that office is in the business of knowing. But despite all that, of course, I really didn't want to find him dead, legitimate target or not. Supporting the troops while opposing that Big Picture is not a new thing for me. It never stops being a strange place to be.

I was lucky, as it turns out - he'd not been in that morning, and while the plane did hit the office (they'd just moved into the new section of the building that was hit, ironically enough), he'd been back in his apartment, and was only dealing with helping notify the relatives of all his former coworkers who'd been on shift at the time - 1/3 of the people, since they all worked in three rotating shifts.

Of course, they knew what they were getting into when they signed up for the job, and that did make it a bit easier.

That did get me to thinking, though, about all the people in the World Trade Center who did nothing more than wake up and go to work, only to find themselves trapped in a burning building from which they knew they wouldn't get out, and all those people waiting for the elevators on 78 who ended up getting cut in half (people who made it out said it was like a slasher horror movie in there) holding their bagels and coffee. Later that night I was in a public bathroom and I couldn't help remembering there was a woman named Susan whose last words (that we know of, from a surviving coworker of hers) was that she was going down the hall to the bathroom and would be right back. She wasn't right back. Got me thinking, wow, what would it be like to be in this bathroom but 90 floors up and the wall has fallen in and there's no getting out and worst of all you KNOW there's no getting out? The floors got hot and buckled under people before they fell, trapped there in the bathrooms and the cube farms.

Those people didn't sign up for that sort of thing. Sure, they worked in the World Trade Center, and there's all sorts of issues with the system of world trade and the particular form of ruthless no-holds-barred capitalism and the associated American hubris that it came to represent, and the whole North vs. South thing, and probably a lot of those companies were involved in some pretty depressing stuff, and so, okay, I can see why it might have been chosen as a meaningful target. But those people cowering in the bathrooms and getting burned and shredded, they were just going to work, there were computer programmers and secretaries and busboys and lawyers and bankers and all sorts of people just doing their jobs, you know, they maybe didn't buy into the whole Big Picture, but they gotta pay rent, and with the economy the way it is, how many people really have the guts to up and quit their jobs over the Big Picture that many of them probably don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about? Just go to work, keep your head down, get paid, catch some SNL, somehow it'll all work out, but then oops you just got blown up. Maybe they shoulda quit.

So now, we're sending 250,000 people halfway around the world to go blow up a hell of a lot more buildings in a country that had zip-all to do with the murders of 9/11. Lots of them are kids who are buying a line, they don't know about the Big Picture either, because once you're inside, they don't tell you everything. These people have named their camps after the sites of murders committed by nationals of an entirely different country, and they've got giant bedsheets with silhouettes of the World Trade Center painted on them, draped across the front of the battleships and aircraft carriers that are gonna blow up new skyscrapers in a country that had nothing to do with the World Trade Center mass murders. But the people on top, the ones drawing the Big Picture, they don't bother to correct any of it, because it's useful to whip up the righteous anger that makes it easier to blow up yet more buildings.

3500 bombs in two days. There's going to be more people cowering in more bathrooms and in bunkers and getting burned up and shredded in front of elevators and on the street and seeing their kids dying in front of them. Computer programmers and traders and busboys and shopkeepers and secretaries and schoolkids, going about their business, watching the floor of the world now fall out from under them. People will be in collapsed buildings and under rubble and calling to their coworkers and their families for the last time.

Thing is, plenty of those people didn't sign up for this sort of thing either. Problem is, they had the luck to born in the wrong country. Maybe they should have risen up while we starved them over the past 12 years, they shoulda quit - they shoulda overthrown their government. But how many of them, day to day, are really seeing the Big Picture? They just go to work, trade on the market, keep their head down, go to the theater and hope things will turn out ok. But they're gonna get blown up, because Bush wants his demonstration war. They shoulda risen up when they had their chance!

But then I get to thinking, it's a bit ridiculous for us to require a people who haven't had reliable clean water for 12 years to rise up against their government on our orders, when our own leaders don't even have the guts to criticize the president with mere words on the floor of Congress. We require a revolution over there, when we're demonizing people over here who dare to stand in the street holding signs?

Ah, but we're liberating them! Yes, that's the cause du jour, now that WMD haven't been found and even the president is admitting in the New York Times that Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with the 9/11 murders (though he's not yet asked the aircraft carriers to take down the bedsheets). Perhaps they will be thankful as they cower in their collapsing rooms and buildings. Perhaps they'll finally understand that we require so many of them to die to show the rest of the world that the United States can really Kick Major Ass. Maybe they'll see the Big Picture.

I don't want to see the kids we're shipping halfway across the world come home in body bags. I don't want to see them throw themselves away in an immoral offensive war that we did not have to take part in. I want them to come home safely. I don't want to see them get so messed up and hurt by this war that they come home and kill (or blow up buildings) here in the United States. But no, I don't support their actions. I don't support the Big Picture. I hope they eventually come to see the Big Picture and come around. May God help them, and us.

I will be at the rally tomorrow.

(Note: Incidentally, the last time I had head lice was in the second grade.)