Liberal Street Fighter

Americans like this scare me:

Five miles past the paved road, up on a hill of no name, lives a one-eyed man with a one-eyed cat.

They sleep in a van parked against the patchwork fence that lines the border with Mexico. He is solitary, lean, trying to hold back a tidal wave of humanity. The cat is overweight.

Britt Craig describes himself as a 57-year-old Spartan, a decorated war veteran, a Buddhist, a damaged and lonesome man, a lover of books who can pull bits of philosophy from the corners of his confinement.

“The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made so and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself,” Mr. Craig says in the 100-degree heat, quoting John Stuart Mill almost perfectly.

He is a member of the Minuteman Project, a group of civilians dedicated to fighting illegal immigration from Mexico. He has done his part simply by standing here, watching, for 500 days.

What is so frightening that someone would choose to do that? Where is the line between a patriot standing watch, and a paranoid or racist jingoist keeping out the unwashed hordes? How to confront these fellow citizens?

Fear?

Anger?

Hatred?

Pity?

How to feel when confronted by his view, his motivation?

The son of a Georgia newspaperman, the grandson of a Georgia newspaperman and the great-grandson of a gentleman farmer, Mr. Craig never lived up to family expectations.

He did poorly in school and thought he would prove himself as a warrior. He enlisted as a paratrooper and lost his left eye in Vietnam. By his account, he came home to mockery and derision and this knocked him sideways.

So he drifted. Sailed. Fished. Pounded nails. Made music in Puerto Rico. Knew a few women and forgot a few women. Finally, in his later years, he grew roots on this hill. He makes his morning toilet with a bucket and a shovel.

“I never got that 1945 reception,” he says from beneath the shadow of his canvas brim. “Maybe now I’m doing something the American people appreciate.”

Can someone like this even be engaged, be conversed with, when they are so full of anger, so full of a fear intense enough that they don’t recognize it as fear, so isolated that they can’t even stand to be around those who share their beliefs?

Out here petty jealousies, rivalries and divisions have arisen. Across the country, the Minuteman movement has splintered into a half-dozen factions, Mr. Craig answering only to himself.

There is another man who lives on a hill on the horizon to the west. He, too, is an Army veteran, a retired fisherman and a 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week “scout.” He flies a large American flag from a makeshift 30-foot pole, carries a .45 pistol in his waistband and lives in relative luxury in an R.V. with a port-a-potty. That man, Robert Cook, also 57, goes by the nom de guerre Little Dog.

Mr. Cook is annoyed that Mr. Craig will not respect his position as director of Campo border operations for the Minuteman Project. And so he has referred to Mr. Craig as a phony war hero, compared him to male genitalia and rifled off an e-mail message to CNN calling Mr. Craig a swine who lives in a cat box.

I feel part of the problem, a barrier to any solution, because I’m disgusted by people like this. I’m repulsed by homophobes, by bigots, by greedy Wall Street types … hell, I have a hard time concealing my contempt for denizens of suburban sprawl, folks who extol the virtues of rural life. I can’t engage, because …

Well, like that man on the hill, I know that my worldview, that what I hold sacred, is mocked and disregarded and unwelcome in what passes for political discourse in this society.

There IS no political discourse in this society.

I chuckled in personal recognition as I read a profile today of Spike Lee:

Spike Lee is not the warmest guy in the world. He may not even be the warmest guy in the Royalton. He cares about people, but it’s unclear how much he likes them.

Misanthropes of the world unite. I don’t have much in common with Spike Lee, except for some broad political beliefs and that fundamental truth. I want the best for people, but I’m not sure I like them very much.

We are stuck, because there is no common language, no civic vocabulary. We all claim the same founding myths, but understand them in utterly different ways, tell the stories with different cadences. Where I see the Founding Fathers as children of the Enlightenment, as Deists and mortal men who chose a system of laws established by men, a sizable portion of my countrymen see a cadre of Christians guided by the hand of God. Where I see genocide and ruthless landgrabs, others see manifest destiny and a simple fact of life when two cultures want the same natural resources. We are demons and ghosts haunting the others’ world, unable to touch or even see each other as sharing any common ground at all. I can point at historical records, at photos and diaries and newspapers. They point at conflicting accounts, discounting any carefully martialed citiations that I or others could gather for their perusal. Different worlds, at war with each other.

We are stuck. We have no structures, no existing institutions to shore up our common grounds. They have all been corrupted, corrupted by money or neglect or apathy or cold, calculating authoritarian design. By all of those things, but by none of those things alone.

We once had authoritarians who built highways that tore neighborhoods asunder, yet somehow they also built civic structures that gave people places to meet and mingle and find cool succor from life’s trials. Now, our authoritarians build businesses and churches designed as fortresses, moats of concrete and security designed to keep the unwelcome out, to make the chosen feel nurtured and welcome.

How to confront my fellow citizens, led around by fear and hatred? How to process my own fear, my own loathing of THEIR fear?

We’re at a time where civil conflict seems inevitable. A lot of issues undealt with for decades, for centuries, need to be fought out, and perhaps a people so enamored of blood and militarism and guns are doomed to eventually use those tools again. As Spike notes:

“What was discouraging to me was, some people–it was like a revelation: I never knew we had poor people in this country,” before Katrina. “I think the United States government has done a very good job of covering up the poor so unless you really, really … You might see a homeless person, you know, on the street, but you can avoid it. You can bypass a lot of stuff,” says Lee, twisting the diamond stud in his ear. He speaks slowly, deliberately, like a professor or a certain kind of pot smoker. It’s a dispensation, not a discussion; he does not look you in the eye.

“Katrina pulled that away, all that cover, left it bare like a raw, exposed nerve,” he says, and starts to pick up a little steam. “And I don’t think we should try to slide it under the rug and act like it doesn’t exist. And I don’t think we’re ever going to get to the place where this country can … I don’t think we’ll ever achieve our true greatness.”

He is silent for a second and stares into space and then, “We’ve still not dealt with slavery!” His words come in a rush. “Black, African-American, and white Americans, we still have not dealt with slavery! When kids are in school and they’re learning about motherfucking George Washington, say the motherfucker owned slaves!” He is still sitting but bouncing, vibrating on the balls of his bright- yellow, brand-new Nikes. “Say what Christopher Columbus did! Kids are still learning in-1492-he-sailed-the-ocean-blue bullshit. George Washington could never tell the truth; he did chop down that motherfucking cherry tree. All right. Get rid of that shit and say he owned slaves. Say the first president of the United States owned slaves! Let’s stop with the lies. Let’s talk about the genocide of the Native Americans! All right, if you don’t want to talk about black and white, all right, let’s leave that aside. Let’s talk about the blankets with smallpox that were given to Native Americans. Let’s talk about the landgrab. I want to make a movie about Custer. I want to show Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull kicking ass!”

For my part, I can’t see how we can solve our problems until we confront them, until we hold them out in the light and listen to the witness offered by the agrieved. I can’t find common ground with that man on the hill if he won’t recognize that it’s not as simple as his border would make it. So much talent that might help us solve our terrible problems is locked up in prisons for petty drug crimes, gay-bashed into silence, screamed at as man-hating, dismissed as soft-headed and naive. That man on the hill is lashing out in his way because he feels he was denied compassion when he returned from a criminal war, and who is to gainsay him his belief? He blames it on a public who held no parades, rather than on the criminal leaders who made parades for warriors feel like celebrations of an obscenity. If more Americans had demanded our government provide him more help, would he have felt driven to that hill? Is the prosecution of a war going to always produce damaged souls who are beyond help? We’ve failed to confront this question throughout our history, turning away from vets who became outlaws, gangsters, suicides, bonus marchers, war protesters, homeless supplicants and yes, even jingoistic hawks and bombers of federal buildings and abortion clinics.

Perhaps I can take hope in another veteran taking a lonely stand on a hill. Ehren Watada gave a speech this past weekend to Veterans for Peace National Convention:

I wasn’t entirely sure what to say tonight. I thought as a leader in general I should speak to motivate. Now I know that this isn’t the military and surely there are many out there who outranked me at one point or another – and yes, I’m just a Lieutenant. And yet, I feel as though we are all citizens of this great country and what I have to say is not a matter of authority – but from one citizen to another. We have all seen this war tear apart our country over the past three years. It seems as though nothing we’ve done, from vigils to protests to letters to Congress, have had any effect in persuading the powers that be. Tonight I will speak to you on my ideas for a change of strategy. I am here tonight because I took a leap of faith. My action is not the first and it certainly will not be the last. Yet, on behalf of those who follow, I require your help – your sacrifice – and that of countless other Americans. I may fail. We may fail. But nothing we have tried has worked so far. It is time for change and the change starts with all of us.

I stand before you today, not as an expert – not as one who pretends to have all the answers. I am simply an American and a servant of the American people. My humble opinions today are just that. I realize that you may not agree with everything I have to say. However, I did not choose to be a leader for popularity. I did it to serve and make better the soldiers of this country. And I swore to carry out this charge honorably under the rule of law.

Today, I speak with you about a radical idea. It is one born from the very concept of the American soldier (or service member). It became instrumental in ending the Vietnam War – but it has been long since forgotten. The idea is this: that to stop an illegal and unjust war, the soldiers can choose to stop fighting it.

Now it is not an easy task for the soldier. For he or she must be aware that they are being used for ill-gain. They must hold themselves responsible for individual action. They must remember duty to the Constitution and the people supersedes the ideologies of their leadership. The soldier must be willing to face ostracism by their peers, worry over the survival of their families, and of course the loss of personal freedom. They must know that resisting an authoritarian government at home is equally important to fighting a foreign aggressor on the battlefield. Finally, those wearing the uniform must know beyond any shadow of a doubt that by refusing immoral and illegal orders they will be supported by the people not with mere words but by action.

He points out that soldiers can’t do this alone, any more than marchers or hunger fasters can:

I tell this to you because you must know that to stop this war, for the soldiers to stop fighting it, they must have the unconditional support of the people. I have seen this support with my own eyes. For me it was a leap of faith. For other soldiers, they do not have that luxury. They must know it and you must show it to them. Convince them that no matter how long they sit in prison, no matter how long this country takes to right itself, their families will have a roof over their heads, food in their stomachs, opportunities and education. This is a daunting task. It requires the sacrifice of all of us. Why must Canadians feed and house our fellow Americans who have chosen to do the right thing? We should be the ones taking care of our own. Are we that powerless – are we that unwilling to risk something for those who can truly end this war? How do you support the troops but not the war? By supporting those who can truly stop it; let them know that resistance to participate in an illegal war is not futile and not without a future.

I have broken no law but the code of silence and unquestioning loyalty. If I am guilty of any crime, it is that I learned too much and cared too deeply for the meaningless loss of my fellow soldiers and my fellow human beings. If I am to be punished it should be for following the rule of law over the immoral orders of one man. If I am to be punished it should be for not acting sooner. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period … was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.”

Decades after this current criminal war we may well have new men waiting on hills, perhaps guarding new boundaries between balkanized formerly-united states. Can we find enough common ground to find compassion for each other, to resist the anger within us that reinforces conflicts with the authoritarian minded? I know I have a long way to go before I can do more than make tremulous promises that I will, because I still haven’t moved past my anger and hate and fear of the lonely men on the hill, of the stressed out winger suburbanite, of the blissed-out believer in coming Apocalypse. When I confront the silouette of the armed man on the hill, it is a reflection of myself that I confront. I and all of us would be better served to honor those who say no, who refuse unlawful orders, who starve themselves rather than remain quiet, who march in streets or who take the frightening step to quitely join a union or walk through chanting zealots to maintain the dignity of their own bodies. Perhaps these meager words are my version of those things, for now that seems all I have to offer.

May we find a way to find peace, each of us on our own hills, and learn to smile across the intervening valleys at our neighbors.