Midlife Meditation

Last week, driving through Washington state, I saw this bumper sticker: My first reaction was anger. I remember well how, following the 9/11 attacks, my country went insane with bloodlust. We wanted desperately to find someone, anyone, responsible and teach those monsters a lesson. We wanted to bomb their camps, invade their countries, obliterate every human being who was in any way involved with any organization that might have had something to do with this attack on America. And when rooting out the actual terrorists proved more difficult than we'd bargained for, and capturing the mastermind of the atrocity an elusive goal that was to prove, for more than a decade, unattainable, we found a different target, and rained down our fury on Iraq, a country that had had nothing at all to do with the attack, but did have a real jerk for a president. Just to be clear: for all the empathy I may have felt for that reaction, I opposed it. I was living in a community called the Pe...

Things are falling apart. The end of World War I saw the establishment, across Africa, Asia, and even Europe, of new nations created by treaties drawn up by the winners of that conflict. Many of these nations functioned as colonies until the 1950s, when they began declaring independence. The superpowers drawing up their borders paid little or no attention to the territories of ethnic groups, and thus throughout Africa ancient nations like the Ewe found themselves living in multiple nations, often with borders running down the middle of villages. It also brought together groups of people who would not, of their own accord, have formed a state with each other: Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians in Yugoslavia; Christians, Jews, and Muslims in Lebanon; and, in Iraq, Shia, Sunni, and Kurds. Some of these nations were able to establish unity governments, and even to have democratic elections, but for the most part, they stayed intact as long as they did because of the presence of a strongman in...

In the late winter of 1990-91, I watched my country go mad. It really began in December 1989, with the invasion of Panama. I watched it unfold on British TV: the almost literal saber-rattling of Noriega (I believe it was actually a machete he waved in that press conference), followed by the lightning strike of American forces. The message was clear: don't mess with American interests. Apparently Iraq wasn't listening, as just eight months later Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, once again putting the American economy at risk. Of course there would be another strike, but this time it would have to be an international coalition. Unilaterally deposing Noriega could be explained as the U.S. acting in the world's behalf, policing its own backyard to protect global commerce. Going into a Middle Eastern country to liberate oil wells would be a much tougher act of aggression to spin. President George H.W. Bush went to work on American allies, building a case against Saddam Hussein, ...