Tomorrow night is my cousin DJ’s going away party. He’s going to Missouri for Basic Training because he joined the U.S. Army. It’s the first time that someone in my family, in my generation, is going in to the military.
During the last couple of years of high school, and for most of my time in college I was adminantly political. Not in the sense that I ever really did anything, but I had lots of opinions. Wait, let me rephrase that. I had lots of unfounded opinions. What else can I say other than it was a rather typified sense of radicalism, believing in anything non-traditional and really believing that if our country or maybe even our world could implement some of more left-wing lines of thought, then we could really go somewhere.
I remember September 11, 2001. 9/11. I remember being in class, at BU, stunned that I was only half-informed of what had just happened in New York City. The more stunning thing was, I was 50% more informed than most of my classmates. I was living at home with my parents at the time, and walked in to the kitchen for my morning travel mug of coffee. I saw the first plane hit the WTC, and somehow I didn’t get that perturbed. I left the house, but did turn on the radio as soon I got in the car. Every station I turned to had been reporting what was going on. “What is going on?” I asked myself.
I knew what happened, but I wasn’t sure how, why, or what was going to happen next. I wasn’t sure what to think, and in turn I really wasn’t thinking. I saw people running to other people on the street, most with their cell phones in hand. I saw people crying. But I parked my car in the student lot of Comm. Ave and started my 5-minute walk to my Rhetoric class. The scene was similar on the inside. In between classes I made every effort to talk to people, I called my boyfriend who had not heard of anything. He was working in an office in the storage room all morning.
After my Rhetoric class, the students were on the street looking at the sky. The word on the street was that Boston would be next. That day it was said that Osama bin Laden’s neice, who attended BU at the time, was ordered to leave the campus. Wafah Dufour (formerly Wafah bin Laden) was being taken to military headquarters for questioning. It turns out that she was not on campus at all and was in Geneva with her mother during the time of the 9/11 attacks.
That evening I was driving home from school. I had been catching this and that about the attacks all day, and was feeling confused. I remember watching the news that night huddled on the couch with my boyfriend, and my parents upstairs, probably watching the same news. It was so soon after these events that I turned this confusion in to something that I thought was productive at the time. I started researching the ties, the threads, and the reasons why people would attack our country like this. I started putting together a puzzle, and deduced something close to sheer incompassion. I attempted to understand why our country was attacked, and I started to justify those reasons by reacting negatively to what our country stood for.
Not soon after I was knee deep in politics. I guess you could say I jumped on the bandwagon, but didn’t everyone feel like that wanted to do something at that time? The time between that day and the day that the war started in Iraq is blurry. Though I came to understand things so much more clearly over the next few years, I was still trapped in the mindset of anti-Americanism in so many ways.
I remember meeting someone new and hanging out for the first time. He asked me, “Do you like Christmas?” Strange question, I thought. At the time I had such a quick answer. I told him that I liked the time I spent with my family and this and that, but I didn’t like how it is corporatized by our country. From there I remember going off on capitolism and how it’s just terrible. I was angry at our country, but not necessarily because I didn’t like it. I was angry because our government allowed things to go down the way that they did. So from there I started to dislike our government, the people through whom it was comprised, and the people who supported it. I went to the anti-war protests held in Boston, and I even started believing the Palestinean support groups who would stand outside of the Israeli embassy chanting that Sharon was a dictator of some sort.
I watched operation Shock and Awe in Baghdad on every major TV station. The display of fireworks through the eyes of night-vision goggles infuriated me. I felt ignorant, and I felt vulnerable to believe in something that attempted to explain the bad things that were happening in our world. But, as time went on I grew less angry. I tried to educate myself in a more balanced light, and I stopped thinking about politics so much. Still whenever I read stories of soldiers, tally the death count of soldiers in Iraq, or listen to our President speak, I grow a small fireball in my belly.
I’m not an advocate of the war that is still going on, and I don’t believe in what our government tells us half the time. I believe in what I see, and I believe in what I know and this is a lesson that has taken some time in learning. I know that I love my cousin, DJ and I know that he is the first person from my life that has made the choice to serve our country. What I don’t know is where this decision will take him. It’s hard not to connect the idea of the military and the reality that there is a war, or whatever you want to call it in Iraq right now. I know that it’s not going to be over soon though.
Whenever I heard of other people’s decision in joining the military, a part of me that didn’t let itself out always said, “now, why are you gonna go do a thing like that? there’s a war going on! are you crazy?” But when DJ told me about his decision, I didn’t have that thought. I accepted his decision because he is intelligent and he is his own person. He told me that he wants to help people. And I’ve got to say that the way in which he’s going to do it is something much more complicated, and multi-faceted than anything I have done. Respect for the free will is something to keep in mind often, though it can be hard when you feel so connected to something that you wish you had control over it. But if I did have control, I wouldn’t even try to change his mind. DJ, I love you, I’ll miss you and will always think of you. Good luck in Basic Training little cuz.
I call this DJ and DJ…
DJ playing 4-Square with the fam on Easter ‘05. He kicked the munchkin’s butts!
DJ and our cousin Samantha getting krunk at a party. Freshies.