Internal Battles, Part 2

My half-Jewish, half-Swedish boyfriend taught me about Jewish stereotypes. Everything: the big noses, the dark curly hair, the greedy hoarder image, the Goldberg's and the Rosenblatt's. I didn't even knew they existed.

Ignorance has a bad rap. I wonder if pure ignorance really is bliss. It's the partial ignorance that can get so muddled and cause so much trouble.

I came out of college one year ago knowing practically nothing about our War on Terror. The towers were hit my senior year of high school. I watched it on television during drama class. None of it registered at the time. I watch the same footage now, and I am horrified. I think how awful it must have been for the people who were there. Then I remember that my brother, Ned, and my sister, Ellen, were there, right there.

Just as quickly as the smoking image came in, the image went out. I didn't want Bin Laden's blood. I didn't want to comfort the dead. I didn't want revenge. I didn't want to watch the terror-meter. I didn't want to worry. I just wanted to forget, and I did.

I had a few encounters with political conversations during college, for which I vehemently expressed my displeasure. I remember being disgusted by the idea of bringing Democracy to Iraq. Mostly because I had recently read "Democracy in America" for school, and I thought the idea went against everything Alexis De Tocqueville had so eloquently professed.

When the 2004 elections came along, I did my part as a citizen. I registered to vote, and voted against Bush. Bush stayed. I got angry. I went back into my haze.

I didn't know what to think when I heard that my brother, Lance, and later my cousin, Max, were going to Iraq, going to fight this war. Not knowing what the war meant made it hard for me to form a judgement. I knew others were horrified, but I found it hard to feel anything. I actively forgot.

When my temp agency called me for a job at a place called Al Jazeera, I was clueless. I looked it up in Wikipedia, and all it said was "Arabic news channel". I couldn't fathom what I could do for an Arabic news channel, but I took it anyway. I spent the next six months with Wikipedia and the Al Jazeera English channel (the English news channel I was actually working for) as my only friends. I felt like a character in a science fiction film getting zapped with infinite information all at once. When I found the entry for "Guantanamo Bay," I felt like the pure being in The Fifth Element looking up the word "WAR". Total disillusionment.

Now I consider myself "politically aware," even well-informed. Not just on Bush's War on Terror, but everything considered of note happening all over the world.

So I ask myself, "what now?" Now I shake my head a lot, like a boat rocking back and forth on calm water. Now my eyebrows find themselves in an upward bow pose quite often. Now I hurt for other people.

I'm just not sure of the value of information. Things stay as they are, regardless of my knowledge of them. The elections in Africa are still corrupt. Powerful nations still torture, withhold, and stifle. The children are still starving.... I know that knowledge contributes to my feeling of impotency. I just wonder if it does anything positive.

I watched a special on US soldiers who went to Iraq on our channel. The special said that many soldiers cannot re-immerse into society, and long to go back to war as a result. The special showed a few soldiers talking about their experiences coming home. How they can't sleep. How they feel constantly threatened. How they are always on edge. That's when I realized that I never asked my brother what it was like, how he felt. I never spoke to my cousin about it. I didn't even wonder. Then I was truly horrified. Then I cried.

Now I long to know. I can't wait to ask. I want to hear everything. I want to feel my bowing eyebrows, my sinking stomach, my tightening throat. I want to feel it with Lance. I want to feel it with Max. I want to hurt for them, not just for strangers and far away children. I want to understand.

Can knowledge lead to understanding?