Some years ago my
daughter and I had the privilege of visiting the Great Rift Valley in Tanzania.
Not far from the millions of wildebeests and zebras migrating across the Serengeti
Plain, the Olduvai Gorge museum was occupied that day by a single gentle
African supervisor. There were no other tourists. We had this place of origins to
ourselves.
The museum celebrated Louis Leakey and colleagues' discoveries of the fossil remains of
our most distant bipedal ancestors. The most striking exhibition was a replica
of 3.7 million-year-old footprints in fossilized mud, clearly those of a male,
a female, and two children. These fragile indentations were poignantly immortalized
by volcanic ash that rained down from a sudden eruption, preserved until Leakey’s
team unearthed them.
As we exited the museum
into the windswept parking area, I experienced my own inner eruption from some foundational
depth. Tears began to pour. I had no clear idea why. The gentle curator came
out and put his arm around my shoulder. From his kind gesture I sensed that
others besides me had had a similar response to the museum’s displays, as I
tried to put into words whatever had me in its grip. “All the wars. . !” I
sobbed, and he nodded.
That was part of it—the sad
waste of human-on-human violence through the passage of millions of years—but
not all of it. We had experienced a visceral connection with that far-off little
family not only as tragedy but as hope. Their footprints had erased the immense
chasm of time between us and them. They and others like them had managed to
reproduce and carry the human experiment forward, in a delicate unbroken chain stretching
across millennia to the present. Their meeting of their survival challenges had
made our own lives possible.
The experience in Olduvai
Gorge rushed back as I read of President Trump’s assassination of the Iranian
general Qasem Soleimani. My moment in the Gorge twenty years ago, the
experience of a connection across time deep enough to cause tears, of feeling
overwhelmed by all that our species has gone through, begged the question: when
will we ever learn?
Secretary Pompeo’s and
President Trump’s rationalizations for the killing of Soleimani were typically
Orwellian: “We did this not to start a war but to stop one.” It’s the same kind
of absurd calculation that motivated bin Salman when he had Jamal Khashoggi
strangled and dismembered—and went on to sentence to death half the team that
did the deed under his own orders.
We feel weariness and
exasperation at the banality of our tit-for-tat violence against each other. After
endless tribal clashes, crusades, Stalin’s or Pol Pot’s or Saddam’s or Assad’s
exterminations, the Turkish or Nazi or Rwandan genocides, have we learned
nothing about the ultimate futility of an eye for an eye, which, as Gandhi said,
only makes the whole world blind?
A plague on both their
houses, the American and the Iranian “leaders”—a plague on all their houses—the
murderous, up-to-no-good Soleimani, the Russians who support the Iranian
militias and Assad as he decimates his own people, the grotesque excesses of
ISIS, Putin’s own thuggish assassinations of dissidents, the Chinese forced
”re-education” of the Uighurs, the cowardly Saudis trembling at the
independence of the mild-mannered Khashoggi.
So much militarism and murder
and cruelty and torture around the world so that dictators
can keep ordinary human beings in line by intimidation and violence and gross violations
of privacy—by “facial recognition” technology without real recognition— of
mutuality.
So many refugees, so many
children mentally or physically damaged. Where is the Greta Thunberg who will
hurl indignation at the shameful failure of grown-ups to keep children safe
from war’s ravages?
To say we are children is
an insult to heroic children like Greta. We are not children, we are
infantile—I mean we the human species. Not to have learned from 1914
assassination of the archduke which began WW1, or the treachery of Pearl Harbor
and the first use of the atom bomb in war, or the partition of India and
Pakistan that still reverberates in Kashmir, or the British-American overthrow
of the elected government of Iran in 1953, or the Cuban Missile crisis, or the
failures of Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan.
Not to have learned how futile
it is to hate our enemies more than we love our children.
Not even to have begun to
see we are not Shia and Sunni, Arab and Jew, Iranian and American, Hindu and
Muslim, dark or light-skinned, but one species, all facing the climate
emergency together, all wanting security, nourishing food, clean water, a
better life for our kids, all equally in search of meaning, dignity, fulfillment.
Which means that the two words “diplomatic solution” go together far better
than “military solution.”
Meanwhile the juggernaut
of the arms race rushes headlong toward apocalypse, enriching the few as the threat to all increases. The Russians boast of a new
hypersonic missile that can glide to an exact target anywhere on earth in half
an hour or less, and we Americans mindlessly vow to equal or surpass this
latest destabilizing innovation. We are hell-bent toward the next global war,
but even the most war-loving generals won’t like it when it actually happens. And
it will, it will, unless we start to picture ourselves in each other’s shoes
and work out our differences. As Auden wrote, “we must love one another or
die.”
Isn’t the 3.7 million
years between the footprints of our forebears at Olduvai and 2020 time enough
for us to have learned that violence and war are perfect vehicles for the
perpetuation of conflict, but completely obsolete when it comes to the genuine
resolution of conflict? How much more time do we need? How much more time do we
have?
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