I was in my third year at the University of Utah when the first Gulf War began. Each day when I visited the union before class, students gathered around the televisions, watching images of war as they were broadcast from the battlefields. During commercials the union would ignite into chatter and, sometimes, shouting matches. I wasn't the most politically active student.
In fact, I was a bleary-eyed English major whose sole concerns were graduating, reading literature and writing poems; concerns that seem almost trivial given the current threat of nuclear proliferation and preemptive world leaders. But with the help of other students and a few courageous teachers, I did what I could to see through the fog of war, to understand the war's seriousness and to participate in the conversation about what we wanted for our future.
Roughly 14 years have passed and here we are again, fighting another war, destroying and being destroyed, creating rifts between peoples and nations that will take decades or more to repair.
Images of blackened corpses, bombed-out homes, beheadings and dead and mutilated children confound the very notions of global community and humanity. So is this how presumably higher animals -- those darlings of creation -- human beings behave?
Doesn't such behavior demand a response? And how has the ASU community responded to these atrocities and hypocrisies? I'm afraid it hasn't. Not really. Apart from editorials in The State Press (the frequency of which is merely a trickle compared to when the war began) and the occasional letter-to-the-editor, the ASU community has been eerily silent.
I detest the superficial coverage of the war by local network television -- with their grandiose war jingles and "sexed up" graphics -- but why this type of packaging exists does not baffle me.
What does baffle me is how a University community could be so essentially voiceless; and how a University paper could fail to offer the most up-to-date, substantial information available. And information is available.
For instance, does the ASU community know that most estimates place Iraqi civilian deaths anywhere between 10,000 and 37,000 men, women and children? Does it know that as of this writing, more than 1,000 U.S. soldiers have died, and that thousands more have lost limbs or have otherwise been maimed or wounded? Like President Crow I believe in the University's mission to "enhance social well-being ... and cultural depth." But we are deluding ourselves if we think this ambition can be realized in an environment in which silence is status quo, and where our values and the reasoning behind them remain hidden.
But by all means, plan your careers. Publish your papers. Craft your poems. Devise your theories. Then lay those concerns along side one bullet-savaged casualty of this war and tell me how much they matter.
Maximilian Werner is an ASU English instructor. Reach him at Maximilian.Werner@asu.edu.
