No Such Thing as a Winnable War

I’ve been talking with some fellow artists about how to approach my next choreographic project… I’m trying to figure out how to tackle the subject of non-violence. I don’t want to make a cute little suite of dances. I know I could do that. But I want something more whole. I want the message to be in each dance, in each part, not to have the audience have to read the whole in order to get the message. 

I find in non-violence a very personal means of relating to the world. But I don’t want to do, like, ‘the autobiography of gandhi’ in dance. I don’t want to use text to make the meaning apparent, or song lyrics. So I know what I won’t be doing…. Possibly un-relatedly, I watched the Presidential debate between Obama and McCain.

I noticed that Obama has capitulated to McCain’s sense that ‘security’ is something that can be bought with war. One of the things that is so brilliant about Obama’s ‘refusal to support the war’ speech is that it expresses the understanding of a need to protect through through avenues other than the military. Including the military, but not limited to it. Obama is now just fighting about who he’d talk to, instead of fighting the bigger point – how do we make our country safe? He would win that one. I know a lot of people are waiting for him to lead us there.

Today was listening to Sting in the car on the way back from getting my oil changed…. I always liked this song, and believe that this war – in iraq, and ‘on terror’ are not winnable wars. We cannot protect ourselves by fighting them. I wish Obama would get back on message. I think he could do good, good things, but not if he becomes like Kerry, and Gore.

 

 

A lot of people have noticed that democratic candidates when they go to the general get soft. Gore, Kerry — they seem to think that to win the middle, they have to act like the middle. They’re wrong, as the Republicans have shown. The Republicans have been very effective about staying Republicans but being the better choice for the middle. They don’t pretend not to have faith. Democrats need to not pretend not to have ideals.

We need to ignore them more. Not affirm their judgement when they act like they’re mature, and we’re silly children – unrealistic.

What is the ideology that sets us apart? Or, what is the ideology that sets us apart that we can win on? Off the top of my head:
1. Security is about more than military
2. The future requires us to invest not in bailouts, but in development – energy independence by all means necessary
3. Don’t give money to people who don’t need it – no taxbreaks for wealthy
4. Country needs all of us – tolerance is what makes america great, what we are founded on

No-one is really prepared for the job of president. But I trust Obama to make more right decisions than the 78 yr old crab-apple tree and his town idiot sidekick. And I trust him because of his ethical/moral sense. Obama is powerfully intelligent, moral, and idealistic. Would some democratic staffers PLEASE figure out how to let him let people know that?

Fate to Love

In December of 1991 I went to Conway, New Hampshire. I attended a five week integrated emergency medial technician (EMT), wilderness emergency medical technician training. All of the students lived together in a dorm. I believe there were sixteen of us. Over the course of those five weeks I made two significant friendships. One was Laura Lee. The other was Joyce Manzella.

Joyce was a little prickly. A little arrogant. She looked about my age. She was in fact twenty-three. I was eighteen. The prior spring she had graduated with her PhD in Biochemistry from Duke. She was brilliant. Loved the outdoors.

Sometimes after dinner wed gather and study in the main building. If you were to imagine a 1960s version of the Hogwarts School for Wizardry, built by rock-climbers, youd have a good idea what this place looked like. The massive wooden door snapped open when you pressed the nose of a large dragon that curled around in the door-frame.

Joyce was very focused, and a bit distant. One night she opened up. A year earlier some friends of Joyces had arranged to go on a two-week trek in Nepal. Last minute one of the friends got sick. On two days notice, Joyce filled the empty spot. Most of the group hiked around a base camp at 16,000 feet, but some of the group were trained mountaineers, and they would leave camp for days at a time, and summit peaks in the vicinity (K2 and Annapurna were both accessed from the camp.)

Annapurna from southern base camp

 

Three days into her trip, an unrelated mountaineering party came through the base camp. They were led by a Nepalese Sherpa named Pemba Sherpa. I learned from Joyce that many of the Sherpas take the last name Sherpa. She explained that the locals make money carrying all of the gear for the tourists/mountaineers. As Sherpas get older, they end up going higher and higher on the mountain, and make more money for this. While the Americans, or French, or Portuguese, are struggling up the mountains with small backpacks, sucking oxygen, the Sherpas are hiking behind with massive bundles, unaided. Some Sherpas actually even summit with their employers – at this point, they become guides. The most talented and experienced Sherpas eventually become head guides, organizing the other sherpas, and leading the foreigners from bottom to top and back. This is what had happened with Pemba. Joyce said that by age sixteen he spoke six languages, all learned while carrying bags up and down the sides of the Himalayas.

Pemba and Joyce fell in love. When I met Joyce, it had been a year since they had been together, which was also when they had met. Joyce was troubled by their lack of communication. Its hard to communicate with someone who spends most of his time between 16 and 23,000 feet. She had spoken to him by phone, briefly, twice. She had written letters and gotten few back. She was scared, and was wondering if she was being played. She was questioning her judgment. She told me in years to come that I was the only person who counseled her to believe. To stay. I still feel very good about that.

Over the next two years Joyce and I hiked together a lot. She introduced me to the Western United States. Joyce didnt mind driving huge distances, so we would take a week or two and go where-ever, starting in Salt Lake where she had taken a job as a bio-medical researcher. She didnt mind being in the car for twenty hours to get to a place that would be lovely to hike in for three or four or five days. I was sort of along for the ride with Joyce, and I didnt mind. She was my friend.

One night Pemba called Joyce, and apologized to her for not being in touch. Then he asked her how far it was from San Francisco to Salt Lake City. He was in the San Francisco airport. They were married that spring in Arches National Park. I visited them once, shortly after the marriage, in this little apartment they had in Salt Lake. They moved to his village in Nepal a few years later and I havent heard from her since.

 

Delicate Arch

 

Laura Lee was actually my roommate at the EMT School. I arrived the day the training began, and we were supposed to be there the night prior. Each room in the dorm had four bunkbeds, and all of the rooms were full except for the one on the end of the hall on the 2nd floor, which was totally empty. As I was unpacking, Laura Lee showed up. She had driven directly from base, having been discharged from the Army less than 24 hours earlier. She had been in the Gulf War (Desert Storm.) She did not mind sharing a room with a man. We got along well, but retained a distance even as we grew more familiar with each other. Laura and I were from very different worlds. I had just graduated from a prep school outside Boston. She was from Alabama, and had just gotten out of the Army.

Laura was amazingly strong. Every morning she got up at five am and went running. And were talking New Hampshire in December. The rest of us were just exhausted from studying. When a mutual friend called and told me that she had killed herself nine months after our graduation I was black in a way that I had never been. Lauras suicide was the first time I experienced that kind of depression.

She had really loved these jeans I had when we lived together. She had indirectly asked me for them. When we said goodbye I had not given them to her, but had felt badly about that, and meant to send them to her. At the time they were only pair of city pants I owned. The night I got the call that she was dead, I had written her a note. It was really a follow up note to the note I had written months earlier that was in an unsealed package with the jeans. I can remember when I packed for college just not finding the time to actually send the package. It lived on my desk in my dorm room until I got the call. I still feel sadness, and some shame, about that.

Fifteen years have passed since I met Joyce and Laura. I still think about them, and wonder about the differences in their lives. The songwriter Josh Ritter says we need faith for the same reasons that its so hard to find. I cling to that, and the memories of my friends.

 

“Fate to Love” Copyright Robert Bettmann
Original May 20, 2006, this edit Sept 18, 2008

In That Heaven

 

   In That Heaven There Should Be A Place
   With thanks to James Beuchler (who wrote a book with this title)

   Ripple, and rise,
   rake, and replace,
   but dont risk the whitewater without knowing what youre doing. 

   What wench or wise man invented the screw? The empty screw? The wake
   up and smell the fresh scent of.. youre still here?

   It would seem its my birthright to have relations with every joint that eases its way
   into my house-boat. Mary, Moses and Adam. Do I not deserve the good things?  
   Have I not the vision for wealth?

   In that heaven there should be a place for me.

 

original 2005, this version September 2008
And yes, copyright Robert Bettmann