CPTnet
19 May 2005
IRAQ REFLECTION: Too much
by Sheila Provencher
The air was heavy today (May 12)--cloudy, oppressive, humid, weather rare
for Baghdad. Yesterday, Wednesday, seventy-one people died in car bombs in
at least three cities.
Can you imagine what it is like, every time you set out in a car across the
city to wonder if you will return? What it is like to drive down Sadoon
Street and see two overturned and burned-out cars in front of ruined
storefronts ravaged by the explosions? What it is like to be sitting in
the Royal Jordanian Airlines office at the Palestine Hotel complex and you
hear the ripping sound of the bombs and then you see the smoke about a
half-mile away?
I don't run to the bombsite because I can't do anything. I just sit there
and wonder how many people are dead, and pray for them, and for the people
who set the bombs, and at the same time I feel glad that it wasn't me there
on the street. Your mind does these things. "Thank God it wasn't me."
But it was someone.
I held my breath driving in a taxi with Amira and the kids today. A wedding
party rode in several cars ahead of us, with young men leaning out of the
cars firing guns in celebration. The police got nervous finally and stopped
one of the cars and searched it.
It's too much. There have been too many gunshots, too many tanks rolling by
in Amira's mother's neighborhood, too many sounds of target practice from
the nearby American base mixed with the sound of kids laughing in the
backyard playing with newly-hatched ducklings and bleating sheep.
Even more common now than tanks and humvees, are pickup trucks full of
Iraqi National Guard soldiers, or Iraqi Police, who drive around randomly
waving automatic weapons at cars and people. The atmosphere feels more and
more like that of a police state.
It is insane. Every day I feel "I have to get out of here." The only way
I've found to respond to the fear is to sit still, breathe, and go deep,
deep, at least once per day. I try to remember that we are all together,
really, and that my individual death would not stop this mysterious,
beautiful Oneness that holds us. We all ARE. When I remember that, in my
body and soul, then I can hear little Huda's singing again even as I see her
looking out the taxi window at the wreckage. I can imagine the sound of a
young soldier's baby laughing, even though he is thousands of miles away. I
can be breathlessly grateful that I am here to follow what I believe, that
RISKING friendship and common ground is the only lasting way to reach beyond
the violence that surrounds us.
"Al Hamdu l'Allah," Iraqis say all the time. "Thanks be to God," for
everything. I wish that we could all really see God's Oneness, and be free.
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