Article - I come from a time of war - Peace & Justice Center of Sonoma County

I come from a time of war
Luigi Petrigh-Dove
This article is published in partnership with the Peace Press Collective as a preview of an upcoming edition.*

  “What’s it like to be from a war zone?” I’ve gotten that question many times.

I’m not from a war zone. I was born in a time of war. I was born, and mostly raised, near Beirut, Lebanon. A city which people who grew up in the late seventies and eighties will equate with the phrase war zone. However, it is a place of life. Life which endured wartime.

During this time of war, from afar, I found out that people only seemed to see the war – the pock-marked walls, buildings in ruins, cars driving past rubble in the street and angry men on camera toting machine guns.

  However, when those things were not happening, life was happening: People going to work, kids going to school, and people stopping by the grocery store on the way home to pick up a few necessities for dinner. Kids playing with a ball in the neighborhood, while teenagers hanging out on the corner wondered to their friends whether their secret crush liked them too. But the backdrop of war takes the forefront in the public imagination, and blots out all the rest. We know this by contrast, and the reality of armed conflict contrasts strongly with much of what most Americans know.

  So what was it like growing up in a time of war? It made it hard to do homework. But the homework made it easier to live through the wartime, the normalcy, the work, applying oneself. What little control one has, when one has no control over one’s surroundings, having for a little while lost even the freedom to move around safely in the town, one finds that one can control one’s mind’s activity.

  So I did homework. It was not any easier with the sounds of distant bombs and gunshots. But doing the homework made it easier to live through those sounds. I assume it is the same spirit, the same comfort, which took my dad to his workplace, even when snipers were positioned in the neighborhood. (Maybe he just didn’t know how close they had gotten.)

  We immigrated to this new continent in 1990. And, so we arrived in Los Angeles, settled into a nice apartment, and started our lives in a new place. But no sooner had we arrived than the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet Union’s power projection crumbled, and there was no counter-balance to US power in the Middle East.

  Fshhht--Boom! American rockets launched into Iraq, as George H. W. Bush picked out a bad guy to justify US military invasion.

  Suddenly, images of rockets lighting up the night skies over Baghdad became interspersed on the evening news – a sort of muted parallel to the sights we had seen from our balcony in Lebanon, overlooking Beirut’s fiery fights on certain nights, muted because the sights were on TV but never became real. The fights were fought on other lands.

  I was attending high school at the intersection of Venice and Normandy. The muted war went on. You could watch it on TV. In April 1992, however, the LA uprising happened – the LA riots – starting at Florence and Normandie, just a few miles south from my school. The oppressed of Los Angeles had rebelled, not accepting to be an underclass. They had hoped that the obvious video footage would establish that violent police beatings were not acceptable, but the broadcast video footage of the police beating Rodney King black and blue only showed that government personnel in uniform can beat who they want in the United States. Human rights were denied.

  So, there I was, taking the bus to school through neighborhoods ravaged by fire and destruction, a city at war with itself, a city where arson and bricks thrown through storefronts had tattered many blocks. A city where the governed rebelled against the ruling class. Once the rioters, moving north, approached Beverly Hills, the police responded with live ammunition and deadly force. The underclasses of Los Angeles do not live on the same streets as the ruling classes. The LAPD drew a line in the sand. They had chosen a battlefront, and how far they would allow their enemy to advance.

  There I was again in wartime. LA looked like a war zone. Was the whole world this way? Was it like this all the time?

  After that, things got quiet for a few years, even as an embargo and depleted uranium took its toll on Iraqi life. But then George Bush Jr. decided to go to war against Afghanistan, and then to invade Iraq again. Driven into action, I was organizing rallies against the war, leading marches in the streets. And there in the streets, facing us, were the police in riot gear – LAPD, LA Sheriff’s deputies, and other “law enforcement.” I found out why the police showed up time and again in riot gear. They showed up to riot! They showed up to riot and make violence! They looked like Roman soldiers, only dressed in black plastic armor, with transparent shields which allowed them to see who they were swinging their batons at without exposing their faces. It was war in the streets! War on the people, and we were the people. Clamoring for peace.

  I started to understand that the military-industrial complex consisted of literal war machines (tanks, guns, bombs), but also consisted of the poverty draft (conscripting the required soldiers from the impoverished end of the population), and that it consisted of rah-rah jingoism. That last one – the hyped-up nationalism – was pounded into us when we stood up in class reciting the pledge of allegiance. And if that didn’t work, it was pounded into us with batons in the streets of Los Angeles. For daring to demand peace.

  So, yes. I came from a severely torn-up area, Lebanon, ravaged by Ottoman occupation, then by French colonialism, then ravaged by the after-effects of Zionism south of it (that settler version of colonialism). Then I came to LA, and saw that the roots of war came from a country at war with itself, a country whose rulers lorded over the underclasses with paid bullies in squad cars and with batons, who use deadly force if they want to. And now I see, in every corner of the country, lawless “law enforcement” abducting community members – the most vulnerable, the most unprotected – the working-class immigrants. Due process is sometimes applied, but only after the target is in custody.

  Much like classmates, friends and coworkers have told me about what went on in their native El Salvador, Nicaragua, Hungary, Honduras, and Guatemala, today’s US paramilitaries create a very different war-like atmosphere – one where the government’s armed squads spread a reign of terror within the fabric of civilian life.

  They are here: Paramilitaries like ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and CBP (US Customs and Border Protection) which we hear referred to as “law enforcement,” but who are really just arbitrary enforcement. They don’t even have warrants from judges to justify their actions. They act for the strong and pick on the weak. Those forces are backed by the US Army and by the National Guard. They are guarding against the people of the country, at war with the communities of the country, at war with the workers and their communities.

  I was born, and mostly raised, in a country which was going through a time of war. I now live in a country whose government has been at war with the world, and since its founding was at war with its population, but now more openly.

  We’re from a planet, called planet Earth, which has been in a time of war.

* Minor formatting and typographic adjustments have been made for web presentation; the content and meaning have not been altered.