No Easy Answers

We all "contain multitudes" as Walt Whitman said

An essay I wrote a couple of years ago, “The Mission and the Missiles,” was published a few days ago in a wonderful literary journal called Consequence. The mission of Consequence is to address “the human consequences of war and geopolitical violence through literature and art.” The poets, essayists, and fiction writers in this latest volume include well-published writers from Palestine, Nigeria, China, India, Hungary, and Ukraine. They are writers, of course, but many are also veterans. Dewaine Farria, the author of Revolutions of All Colors, read aloud from his powerful essay, “Speaking as a Veteran,” at the launch of the latest issue the other evening.

You can read my essay here on the Consequence substack. There’s a paywall, but you can sign up for a free trial. Or you might decide to subscribe so you can explore some of the other writing featured there.

I am not a veteran, though I grew up as a military dependent; my father was a career Army sergeant who worked in the Pentagon for part of his career and who came to oppose the Vietnam War. He marched for racial and economic justice in Washington, D.C. I’ve spent much of my adult life hanging out with pacifists, and have generally defined myself that way, but I found that many pacifists have a pretty superficial understanding of people in the military or who work for the U.S. government.

And yet, lately I’ve been struggling myself with how to regard some relatives who support Trump, yet have been nothing but loving and kind to members of my family who are openly queer and gender non-conforming and to other family members who are not white. At times I want to challenge their apparent belief that policies that support ICE (and which they enthusiastically support), don’t have the potential to harm people they likely know and care about (they are white people who earn money through construction work and house-cleaning) or that the economic challenges they face are not caused by the man they voted for.

But then again, I think of Walt Whitman, that long-haired freewheeling queer poet who embraced the working classes and celebrated sensuality—even he contained unsuspected multitudes. My husband and I recently happened upon his poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and read it with shock. It’s quite long, so I just provide the first four stanzas here:

COME my tan-faced children,
Follow well in order, get your weapons ready,
Have you your pistols? have you your sharp-edged axes?
Pioneers! O pioneers!

For we cannot tarry here,
We must march my darlings, we must bear the brunt of danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the rest on us depend,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

O you youths, Western youths,
So impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship,
Plain I see you Western youths, see you tramping with the fore- 
 most,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Have the elder races halted?
Do they droop and end their lesson, wearied over there beyond  
 the seas?
We take up the task eternal, and the burden and the lesson,
Pioneers! O pioneers!

Rudyard Kipling couldn’t have said it better—or worse—when he urged Americans to “take up the White Man’s burden” and colonize areas of the world Britain no longer had the resources to conquer.