#war making

[stlacroix]

In turbulent times I often reflect back on this small poem by Wendell Berry: 

In the darkness of the moon, in flying snow, in the dead of winter, war spreading, families dying, the world in danger, I walk the rocky hillside, sowing clover.

So tonight, I continue to feed my sourdough starter with the hope of one day making bread to share with others. I care for my friends in L’Arche, up in the middle of the night with various needs and in search of different forms of comfort. I clean out the bathtub, start the laundry, and snip a small portion of a climbing vine in the living room to soak in water so it will grow roots. Tomorrow I will make breakfast. Together my friends and I will pray before eating, with my prayer asking that these acts of care and peace will reverberate beyond my small corner of the world. 

[stlacroix]

Yeah, the Syrian government has been massacring its own people for over five years now. So what happened that the United States decided to get involved in a very visible way? Dean Dettloff (PhD candidate, podcast host, journalist, peer) has some thoughts:

“The most troubling thing about tonight's missile strike on Syria is that it comes primarily as an intervention not in a Syrian armed conflict, but in the American war of public perception. It wasn't until the public was disgusted by the random outbreak of a single chemical weapons attack, repeated over and over as a depraved meme, that the Trump administration rightly understood that this was the moment to act. Scenes of mass suffering in Syria are reproduced all the time, but they rarely enter public consciousness. When they do, they matter. As Jean Baudrillard says, "only the medium can make the event."

Media drives warmaking, warmaking drives media. Paul Virilio told us a long time ago that media representation and war are deliberately and intimately connected. Today this connection is revealed in an instant, an instant that for most of us remains a hashtag, an algorithmic surplus that makes us aware, while in Syria, under at least 60 missiles, the instant is a crater of fire and blood.

Tonight's act of war is one more move in a campaign that has never ended, undertaken by an administration that will never feel victorious, prompted by a swarm of accidental opinions.”