Barbara Kingsolver-Reflections
on Wartime

Published on Friday, November 23, 2001 in the Washington Post

Reflections On 'Wartime'

by Barbara Kingsolver

Lately I've been saying this quiet word, "wartime." It brings a taste
to the root of my tongue, and to my ear the earnest tone of my parents
recalling their teenage years. The word speaks of things I've never
known: an era of sacrifice undertaken by rich and poor alike, of
gardens planted and warm socks knitted in drab colors, people
conquering fear by giving up comforts so everyone on earth might
eventually have better days.

I went looking to see if I was imagining something that never
happened. I found a speech made by Franklin D. Roosevelt on Jan. 6,
1941, that made me wonder where we have mislaid our sense of global
honor. "At no previous time has American security been as seriously
threatened from without as it is today," he said, as he could have
said this day. But instead of invoking fear of outsiders he embraced
their needs as our own and called for defending, not just at home but
on all the earth, what he called the four freedoms: freedom of speech
and expression, freedom of religion, freedom from fear, freedom from
want. "Translated into world terms," he said, the latter meant
"economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy
peacetime life for its inhabitants." He warned that it was immature
and untrue "to brag that America, single-handed and with one hand tied
behind its back, can hold off the whole world" and that any such
"dictator's peace" could not be capable of international generosity or
returning the world to any true independence. "Such a peace would
bring no security for us or for our neighbors. Those who would give up
essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve
neither liberty nor safety."

We seem to be contriving a TV-set imitation -- the look with no
character inside -- in our new wartime of flags flapping above
shopping malls and car sales lots, these exhortations to purchase, to
put down a foot and give not an inch. There's a rush on to squash the
essential liberties of others and purchase some temporary safety for
ourselves. The four freedoms are not much in evidence. Faith and
speech have taken hard blows, as countless U.S. citizens suffer daily
intimidation because their appearance or modewars of belief place them
outside the mainstream of an angry nation at . Any spoken
suggestions about alternatives to violent retaliation are likely to be
called an affront against our country. I struggle to find some logical
path that could lead to this conclusion, that free speech is
un-American, and find as its only source our president's statement:
"Either you're with us, or you are with the terrorists." He was
addressing nations of the world, but that "us" keeps getting narrower.
If FDR's words were published anonymously today, especially those
about force leading only to a "dictator's peace," FDR would get hate
mail.

Gone is the inclusive vision of an earlier president. Freedom from
fear, freedom from want -- these clearly aren't meant just now for the
millions of Afghan civilians placed at risk of starvation because of
the war. Our campaigns proudly place our safety and material
prosperity ahead of any concern for the majority of world citizens who
are starving and frightened -- or for that matter, the hungry here at
home.

Just 13 months after Roosevelt's eloquent call to conscience, the War
Department persuaded him to order the internment of Japanese
Americans. (The War Department, it's now known, manufactured threats
of resident treachery to stir public fear and uphold the concentration
camps). I'm sad to see how far things fell from that January day when
the lives of civilians on other soil were proclaimed as precious as
our own. I would have planted a victory garden and accepted leaner
rations to further that vision of a kinder world, in which all hungers
mattered.

After the famous speech, Norman Rockwell painted the four freedoms;
his "Freedom from Fear" shows two parents in a darkened attic bedroom
tucking two little boys into bed. To look at that image now brings my
thoughts to two other children, one nearby and one very distant. As
our war drives a population into refugee status, immense waves of new
recruits are entering schools in Pakistan and other places where young
men train to a lifelong vow of vengeance against America. One,
somewhere, is just a boy, the age of my youngest child. Today these
two enter new lifetimes of hater and hated, and that door locks behind
us all. The pacts begun today will long outlive the men in Washington
and the momentary popularity of this war. Do they really believe we
have bombs enough to destroy every storefront or cement shell in the
world that could serve as a school for hatred, when hearts are so
turned? If those men can't tap into a vein of compassion right now, I
ask that they search out prudence. I am the parent tonight in that
darkened bedroom, with my knuckle to my mouth as I look at these
children. I raise my voice now to echo Roosevelt's plea for a
worldwide reduction of armaments "in such a thorough fashion," he said
boldly -- yes, in wartime -- that no nation "will be in a position to
commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor, anywhere in
the world."

My parents undertook wartime as a submission to sadness, not an
indulgence in glory. They were led through it by a man who spoke with
a heart full of intelligent remorse, rather than an eye on the polls
of his popularity. I wonder what's happened to leaders who saw
enduring peace as a house built on right, not might, and knew the
world can't be right until all its people live free from hunger,
censorship and the dread of bombs. I wonder where they are now, all
the teenagers and adults of that great generation who threw their
hearts into an era of living simply, that others might simply live.

There's a hollow ring to this loud new wartime motto, "We'll show our
enemies we're more powerful than they are." Our enemies know that
already, they've known it all their lives as they trained to the
careful, hateful mastery of tools the weak may use against the mighty.
They can plainly see we are richer, stronger, in every way more
capable of destruction. I would like us to show them, instead, that we
are better.

Barbara Kingsolver is the author of nine books and was a recipient of
the National Humanities Medal in 2000.