The lights of perspective bounce off our ideas in infinite directions, for what we think we know, is no more the truth than what someone else believes. It has been three years now that we have deliberated President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, discussing the war’s misconceptions, lies, and remorseful regrets. We have tamed the eye of this country to focus on the economic and political repercussions of the decision to invade the country.
It is time to remove ourselves from the politics and take the un-American (or as Bush would say, un-Patriotic) human perspective of our fight and turn to the most unlikely of fields, the Middle East. In the Middle East rests a nation whose euphoric embrace of victory in their war for survival resulted in a necessary and eternal stance of fear and protectionism.
The state of Israel lives on the brink of war; the idea that your own wife or brother will lose an arm or leg in a suicide attack, or be drafted to die in battle are realities. The thought lingers in the mind of the child as she plays hopscotch in her backyard, in the heart of the businessperson while boarding the morning bus, and most importantly, on the pen’s tip of the Prime Minister as he signs a law. Here, everyone is a solider, and everyone shares perspective on a war. They do not merely count the money spent or the lives lost-they bury their husbands and sons.
So before we count the dollars lost for Medicare, or ponder the fallout of United States support in Latin America, let us first embrace the realization that most of our perspectives are not whole. When Bush begins to understand a mother’s fear or a brother’s grim reality that the one they love may never come home, only then may he decide whose perspective we die for.
When Bush sees the world from the perspective of an African boy fleeing genocide in Sudan, only then may he decide where our tax dollars should now be spent. When he helps a teenage girl, raped and alone with a child she was forced to bare, then he can shape our lives. We live in a world defined by our own individual insight – that is the reality. However, before our views affect the world, we must strain the mind and heart to look through a different perspective.
Corey Ciorciari is a sophomore majoring in creative writing and business management. He may be contacted at c.ciorciari@umiami.edu.