muninnhuginn | Reappropriating a Label

~~We've~~I've (just right now I can't be bothered with the plural ravens "lark"--this will be an integrated ravens post) been struck almost dumb with the events of the last week or so, despite their general inevitability and so I suppose a chance to prepare mentally. I've drawn; I've internally replayed the usual poems*; I've read, and occasionally commented on others' thoughts and reactions** to this whole bloody mess, but even expressing my thoughts to that extent has been almost impossible. I've listened to little music and the internal soundtrack's been oddly fractured and near silent too. I've avoided the TV coverage, read the press online, and hence without the impact of printed front page pictures of atrocities, listened to the radio reports only in the evenings and overnight. I've given in to that visceral desire for live coverage only in so far as I've got breaking news from the Beeb popping up in my Inbox. But I've lived in as close to near silence as is possible in the middle of a crowded little city and have not added my voice to the general noise. And a great black mass of something gathers somewhere behind and above me ready to strike. I breathe in, hold, feel the ache, the wall of pain between heart and lungs and rib cage; breath out, hold, feel the emptiness that is not empty and the possibility of the howl that doesn't come; I think each breath in, each breath out. I have the possibility of a headache, the threat of tears. But nothing. The cloud still hovers behind me. No, I'm not reacting to any of this. Not at all. Hah.

Well now I am. I've drawn the feather. As soon as I pick one up (hard this time of year: the birds must be recycling them to line their nests), I'll be wearing one too.

I could start wearing again my PPU white poppies, but that's not quite what I want to say. I can't quite define myself as a pacifist. I reject violence, imperfectly. I'm not a peaceful person: my sleep is populated with the dreamed atrocities I commit; I occasionally raise my hand to strike; sometimes I act violently. Also, since moral codes, principles have always been problematic due to their relative immutability in the face of ever-fluid situations, I cannot definitively say that one particular individual's act of violence, or even an organized act of violence by one group against another, at a particular point in time and space, is necessarily absolutely wrong, absolutely inexcusable. As ever, the Devil's in the detail.

And I'm not a joiner of causes. So wearing the symbol of another organization, that doesn't quite indicate what I want to say, won't wash. (Anyway, I can't find the darn things!)

I know what I do want to say: I am against this war in Iraq. We are dong wrong. (In saying this, I am aware that, like every adult in the democratic "free" world who was of voting age in the early nineties and who did not work sufficiently hard to make sure that we finished the job properly after Kuwait was "liberated", I share the collective guilt for culpable inactivity that is as much a cause of this war as Saddam Hussein and his regime.)

So I shall wear my feather.

And reappropriate a phrase that I've not heard used... yet.

I am in relation to the current war in the gulf a "conscientious objector".

Pedantically, I've checked up on the citations on the OED for both the individual words and the phrase itself:

conscientious: "Of persons: Obedient or loyal to conscience; habitually governed by a sense of duty; scrupulous." Well that's true, I hope. I'd like to think I try to live up to that.
objector: "One who objects or makes an objection; one who brings forward a reason or argument against something, or expresses disapproval of or disagreement with it." Well, I'm objecting and I think I'm doing it with reason and argument.
conscientious objector: "one who refuses to conform to the requirements of a public enactment on the plea of conscientious scruple; esp. such an objector to military service." Well, they've not brought back conscription, so I don't have to make the latter choice. But, yes, I refuse to conform.***

I shan't ask anyone to join me in this (that would be almost as bad as my joining someone else) but, to quote Arlo Guthrie,

"You know, if one person, just one person does it they may think he's really sick and they won't take him. And if two people, two people do it, in harmony, they may think they're both faggots and they won't take either of them. And three people do it, three, can you imagine, three people [...] They may think it's an organization. And can you, can you imagine fifty people a day,I said fifty people a day [...] And friends they may thinks it's a movement."

Arlo Guthrie, "Alice's Restaurant"

* Play list is Keith Douglas: "Vergissmeinicht" and "How to Kill"; Isaac Rosenberg: "August 1914"; Siegfried Sassoon: "Asking for it", "The Dug-Out", "Reconciliation", and the rest; Wilfred Owen: "The Show", "Strange Meeting", "Futility", and the rest; Walt Whitman: "Reconciliation".
** One small bright flicker in the darkness is that there are those very thoughts to read. Schadenfreude, eh? Taking pleasure in the sorrows of others. Not quite, I hope. Simply stated: for the first time in my life, a life in which my spoken, but little acted on, adherence to freedom of expression, freedom from violence, words over all (to misappropriate a bit of the Whitman cited above), have been constants amongst the apparent welter of inconsistencies and contrariness; for the first time, I've not felt I've been running counter to the majority of people I come into contact with. LJ friends as mirrors we piece together to reflect (on) ourselves?
*** Interestingly--irrelevant, but irresistible--the phrase is first cited with reference to refusal to submit to universal vaccination. Do the anti-MMR campaigners know this?