Collateral Damage by Anna Wexler

When I cried about the election, I cried because the weight of my guilt bore down on me and crushed me, making it hard for me to breathe.

I wasn’t guilty of not voting. And I wasn’t guilty of voting for the wrong person.

Seventeen thousand Iraqi civilians have been reported dead. The actual number of civilian deaths related to the invasion is estimated to be 100,000. A John Hopkins study, published in the October 28th issue of the British medical journal The Lancet, arrived at this staggering figure after conducting extensive research in Iraq. This 100,000 competes with the number of innocent men, women and children who have been killed in Sudan in a crisis that the United States has openly condemned as genocide. But when innocents are murdered by us, 100,000 becomes “necessary” for the cause of “democracy,” 100,000 lives that our government sweeps under the carpet as mere collateral damage in a war for which no one can figure out the reason.

I’m not the type of person to cry over death. I don’t cry when I read about horrific murders, tragic suicides, or mass ethnic slaughter. I didn’t cry at the skulls I saw when I visited the Killing Fields in Cambodia; I didn’t cry at the Holocaust Memorial in D.C. or at the chilling Vietnam War Museum in Ho Chi Minh City. Although the genocide in Sudan sickens me, I have not shed tears for its victims.

But I cried for the civilians of Iraq.

The guilt every American citizen bears is invisible while living in this country. But the stain of blood is on our hands, wet and fresh. We don’t see it because living in America, we are part of a crowd. Psychologists and anthropologists have shown that feelings of guilt and of personal responsibility do not exist in a crowd. We do not see our blood-stained hands. Traveling, however, is stepping outside the crowd.

When I stepped outside America, I felt my personal responsibility, and for the first time I realized how bloody my hands actually are. I was in Egypt, and I had befriended a Bedouin family living in Giza, just a stone’s throw from the Pyramids. The entire family was warmly hospitable to me: they showed me around Cairo, drove me to Alexandria, and even took me into their home the last week of my trip.

It was during this last week, at their home, that the emotional weight – the guilt – really hit me. Hamdi and I were drinking tea as the television droned on in the background; Al-Jazeera was showing footage of destroyed cities in Iraq and listing the number of civilian casualties – about twenty a day. Of course, Al Jazeera is just as biased as the American media. However, when I compared the reports of international media outlets, I found that the American media was rarely reporting civilian casualties.

Hamdi asked me why I live in America.

I was taken aback: no one’s ever asked me why. I told him that I live in America because my friends are there, because I want to get my degree from MIT.

But you can move if you want?

Yes, I said.

Looking around at Hamdi’s room, at the shabby, dirty furniture and at the goats roaming around in the backyard, I realized that Hamdi couldn’t move to another country even if he wanted to. Most people in Egypt – and indeed, most of the world – can’t.

So I had a choice. I was consciously choosing to pay my taxes to a government that had invaded Iraq in a willful, deliberate, and premeditated manner. Those words, by the way, are the definition of first degree murder according to the state of California. Most states have similar definitions.

For the first time, I felt personally responsible, as though my taxes were going directly to support the bloodshed in Iraq. Guilt comes only from feelings of responsibility, and responsibility comes only from the experience of making a conscious decision, when one realizes that one can do otherwise. My hands are stained even though I disagree with my government’s actions. Upon returning to America, I comforted myself by thinking that it was only six months until the election. That thought put my feelings of guilt on hold until November.

The issue of personal responsibility came up last week in my class entitled “Violence, Human Rights, and Justice.” A student posed a question about the responsibility of German citizens during World War II. He cited the example of a German railroad employee in the early 1940’s whose job it was to sign off as trains crammed full of Jews passed through his town, transporting Jews to their deaths at extermination camps. The employee strongly disagreed with Hitler’s “final solution,” and had the financial capability to move to another country. However, he consciously decided to remain in Germany, and each day he signed off on the train log. Is he responsible? Is he guilty?

Most of us Democrats are in the same situation as the train manager. The war in Iraq will continue regardless of whether or not we decide to leave the country. More innocent civilians will be killed with or without our tax money. But we need to confront our personal responsibility, because disagreeing with our government does not absolve us of guilt. Because we have a choice in whether or not we want to live in this country. And each of us is responsible for our decision.

Stay and resist, people say; leaving is cowardly and apathetic. But what kinds of resistance are available to us? We can whine about our awful government, but griping is the weakest form of resistance. Voting is a stronger form of resistance, but we must wait four excruciating years for another chance. The only resistance left is activism: letter-writing, door-to-door campaigning, and grassroots organizing. Frankly, the failure of an enormous amount of activism was depressing; but unlike voting, activism doesn’t have to wait another four years. But honestly, how many of us campaigned at a grassroots level for this election? More importantly, how many of us will – in the next four years – campaign at a grassroots level?

I’m not advocating mass exodus, but I am pointing out the inconsistencies between the number of people who call for resistance and the number of people who actually resist. To me, leaving the country is a different kind of resistance. Leaving is the opposite of apathy; it directly acknowledges our guilt and says “No, I will not to support my government’s actions.”

I can no longer fool myself into thinking that I am not guilty. One hundred thousand Iraqi civilians have died; that number has been gnawing at my conscience. I cannot condemn the genocide in Sudan without first looking at my own hands. I cried that Tuesday because I realized that I need to confront my guilt or leave the country.

I can only wish that every single American would be forced to sit across from my friend Hamdi, in his one-room home in Giza. I can only wish that each of us would see our blood-stained hands, would realize our guilt as we hear our own voices stutter and stammer in response to Hamdi’s question:

Why do you live in America?