Out to the Wall
Last edited Fri Jun 8, 2012, 04:51 PM - Edit history (1)
by Kathy Kelly, June 08, 2012
"On the last day of summer, ten hours before fall …
… my grandfather took me out to the wall."
Kabul — When we arrived at the museum, two legless men wheeled themselves past us, traveling in wooden carts operated by a hand-held steering device. Inside Kabul’s OMAR museum, which houses ordnance and land mines used in Afghanistan over four decades of warfare, there were many more pictures of legless, armless and eyeless survivors of land mine explosions lining the walls. The OMAR organization bravely collects and defuses abandoned mines and cluster bomblets before they can produce more casualties such as these (and casualties that are far, far worse) among men, women, and children in Afghanistan.
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Another display case of bomblets from a cluster bomb noted that in 2001 the U.S. had dropped unnumbered cluster bombs each consisting of exactly 202 bomblets. Many of the bomblets would not explode on landfall but would wait years to be stepped on, or picked up, or else driven over or ploughed through by an unsuspecting victim. They looked like yellow building blocks that any unschooled child might take for a plaything, as many had.
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Our guide insisted that before leaving we should all climb into a very old plane parked outside the museum. Once inside, we realized that the plane’s cabin had been converted into a classroom where children visiting the museum were shown films about land mines – how villages could go about clearing them, and how children could avoid them. They were encouraged never to touch a land mine, to identify partially exposed mines on sight, and to understand how terrible these weapons are. With shock I remembered visiting the Intrepid Museum years before, a converted U.S. aircraft carrier that is still moored at its pier in Manhattan, and feeling outraged that the school teachers who had brought their students there would allow the children to climb into the tiny coin-operated facsimile bomber aircraft that let them aim bombs, using a joystick, not even at individual humans but at whole countries, at maps of Iraq and Central Asia, allowing them to imagine bombing whole peoples, for fun, without seeing a single human face.
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And it’s a cliché, but in many ways World War III is starting, is already underway. It’s happening now. The crises in climate stability and global health that international cooperation might have delayed or prevented – incurable TB appearing as predicted in the slums of India, uncontainable in the absence of anything resembling a healthcare system and destined for worldwide spread; global warming data exceeding our former worst-case scenarios. These were crises we ignored in order to fight our butter battle. And our resource wars brought us the chain of escalating economic detonations that seems far from over.
the whole article is at: http://original.antiwar.com/kelly/2012/06/07/out-to-the-wall/
