Part 2: What was it like when I was my students' age...

Finding Answers… War is Over?

            A few weeks ago my 10^th year as a teacher ended.  I began thinking about my life when I was in 8^th grade, the current age of my students.  I was amazed at how much had changed in twenty years.  AOL was new cutting edge technology.  Now every one of my students has a smart phone, laptop and Ipad.  It boggles my mind; even my 11 year old nephew has an Iphone!  I was still trying to figure out Nintendo at that age.  I can’t imagine what middle school would have been like with that technological access.  In part 1 of this blog I talked about how the movies of Top Gun and Rocky IV were formative to my naïve view of the world as a middle schooler.  I grew up believing many simplistic notions, such as:

·      War did not happen again after WW2

·      America was not only good, but helped the little guy.

·      America = good, Russia = bad

·      Life was good, for everyone.  Everyone had it as easy as me.

·      Racism was something of the past that was now gone.

As a 14 year old, I had so many questions that were awakened in my mind by the beginning of the Gulf War and seeing the film, Forrest Gump.  The first of these was the erroneous symbiotic beliefs that war wouldn’t ever happen again after WW2 and that America always made good moral decisions, or more simply, America = good. 

When the Gulf War began in 1990, it was explained to me that a small defenseless country that I’d never heard of, Kuwait, had been invaded by a greedy, power hungry, dictator next door named Saddam Hussein.  This made sense to my mind.  America was good and helping the little guy from a bully.  The war seemed to be a quick success.  Iraq, led by their “evil dictator” was defeated swiftly and the threat to our friends in the Middle East was ended.  I found that this made me proud as a young American. Here we are being a peace maker and putting the bully in his place.  The one thing that confused me, was the fact that this “evil bully,” Saddam Hussein, was still allowed to be the leader/dictator of Iraq.  I wondered, if he was so bad, why would he be allowed to stay in power?  My mind was taught to be simplistic, but I was starting to ask questions.

Eventually I got to college and revisited this question and what I found out shocked me!  First, Kuwait was actually slant drilling Iraq’s oil.  In other words, they were illegally stealing oil from Iraq.  While it is true that the border is pretty porous between the two countries, this practice understandably infuriated Iraq, as their main income was from oil profits.  Secondly, Kuwait was deliberately flooding the market with oil in order to drive the price down.  This too infuriated Saddam.  While his invasion was fool-hearty at best, his invasion was not totally unjustified, and it was clear that it wasn’t just a bully picking on a little guy.  Kuwait was not being a good neighbor.  Ultimately, the US didn’t get involved to defend the little guy, as I was led to believe, they were primarily concerned with the stability of their oil imports from Kuwait and especially worried about any incursion into Saudi Arabia, one of the largest oil suppliers in the world.

Now, however, more bothersome questions arose.  Why are we supporting and defending a country that was breaking international laws on slant drilling?  Why are we supporting the House of Saud and their dictatorship in Arabia?  Saudi Arabia doesn’t allow women to drive or have any equal rights to men, they allow no freedom of the press and are one of the few countries to not sign the UN Declaration of Human Rights.  Why would we be so cozy with them?  This confused me.  How could we so strongly support a country that was so clearly against the principles we claimed to represent?  The answer really disturbed me, it was one word that I was slowly beginning to realize ran the world.  Money.

Over time I came to the realization through my teenage years that my assumption that war was over was naive and completely wrong.  The Gulf War was just the tip of the iceberg for me.  I began to realize that our military wasn’t on vacation since 1945, but had been deeply involved throughout the world and was stationed in countries all over the globe.  In my formative years (the 1990’s) the United States was involved in conflicts in Somalia, Haiti and The Balkans; yet shockingly absent from even trying to stop the most rapid genocide in history in Rwanda. 

When I was my students’ age, I believed that war ended with WW2 and that America’s actions were always good.  At first, the answers to the questions I asked didn’t make sense to me and I didn’t like them.  But then I realized that no nation or country is more morally superior to any other.  They are all stuck in the Machiavellian world of making decisions based upon survival of the state.  The ultimate goal is to keep power and to expand it, because the belief is; if we don’t, they will.  The “they” is always changing however.  It used to be the Soviets.  Now it is the Chinese or the Islamic fundamentalists, or any of the dozens of other groups mainstream America demonizes.  But there is always a “they.”  And sadly we try to keep this view that “we are better” alive.  I started realizing when I was about my students’ age that this is a myth.  War is a constant in the world and we choose sides not based on morality or Human Rights, but on what will keep us powerful.  It has been a sad realization…

Next time: Racism and race relations….