A Descent into Cynicism

I know where I do not want to end up. It gets harder to avoid it as the years go by.

I think of certain things I want to avoid as I age: meanness, stubbornness, aversion to change… I work hard to stymie them and, to date, I have kept them at bay.

Cynicism is another; perhaps less visible than the others, it is, nonetheless, more corrosive to the psyche. I don’t know what I will do if I end up there, but I struggle with it more every day.

I have been to the “killing fields.” There are lots of them and I have seen many—almost always after the fact; though Afghanistan was in real time.

I have seen what warlords do. The havoc that death squads—paid for with my tax money—wreak on a people. I know what happens when an occupying army lets local ethnic hatred turn to bloodbaths. I have stood above the crypts hollowed out in the floors of mosques where the school children are stacked like wood. I have seen what Made-in-the-US big guns look like perched on a hillside pointed at a neighboring village. I have walked the streets where the war on drugs breeds social cleansing.

Most Americans have not seen these things. Nor have they been to Southern Lebanon, Beirut, the refugee camps of Jordan and Syria, Peshawar, San Salvador, the country-side outside Managua, or Mazar-Esh Sharif (as the Taliban—whom the US created—drew near). I have walked among the blowbacks of US foreign policy and met people who were “cleansed” by its “democracy-loving” allies.

My descent, in other words, has causes born of seeing the devastation of what the power brokers in a powerful nation can and will do. Have done.

(Post 9-11 I listened to the fear of my Mauritanian friends who were sure they were next in the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT). I assured them they were not, then left the country on a flight deep into the Sahel with an American who clearly was there to scout out the potential targets.)

I think the long trip down may have started at Sabra and Shatila (which I visited many years later). It was hastened in the first Iraq war, and accelerated when, despite our marches, the US went back to war in Iraq after the WMD lies.

I want to be clear about something right here. I will do everything I legally can to ensure that Donald Trump never enters the White House again. He is a brutal thug with a taste only for himself. Narcissus must soon yield to what someday will be renamed trumpist/trumpism—a pathology about which Christoper Lasch, were he still with us, would certainly write.

However.

However. Just as I withheld my allegiance from Clinton over the “acceptable” deaths in the Balkans; just as I withheld my support when Obama failed to close Guantanamo and extrajudicially murdered Americans with drone strikes (carried out by good American boys sitting in a mountainside in Colorado); so, too, must I withhold my loyalty to the current candidate who supports (take your pick): a pogrom, ethnic cleansing, genocide—in Palestine.

(And I am NOT just talking about Gaza.)

And the contradictions contained in the prior two paragraphs only speeds my downward spiral into what I fear will entrap me—very soon, perhaps within the year.

Because I want, I desire, I yearn for a leader who will shepherd us beyond the hyper violence of the military industrial wasteland that our country has become. We are destruction and if I accept their terms, I will join the tacit confirmation that death dealing is my birthright. My obligation. My sacred duty.

And so I sink.