On Saturday morning I woke up incredibly early (by my standards; it was before 6:30 a.m.) and took one of the few bus lines that wasn't affected by the Berliner Verkehrsbetriebe strikes to the district Moabit, to volunteer at the Berlin charity that gathers and redistributes leftover food from grocery stores.
It was going quite well. First the reddish sunrise at the Beusselstraße station overlooking the shipping containers, train tracks, and GDR architecture, then arriving early at the warehouse and having a coffee before setting off for a drive. I was accompanying a driver who was doing a tour of grocery stores and a bakery shop in Wedding and Prenzlauer Berg to transfer produce and other food into crates, pack the crates into the charity's van, and then bring everything back to the charity's warehouse. There was little traffic early in the day, and as the driver considerately waved tentative pedestrians across the streets, everyone was relaxed and smiling. Hopping out at the stores, checking in with the cashier or going straight to the fruit & vegetable section to find the earpiece'd employee in charge of sorting out donations, etc. went well too.
Two or so hours later, admittedly, the traffic began to thicken and the sunny temperatures to rise. I began to feel hungry for the snacks I'd packed as the driver lowered the windows for fresh air. But I still felt a sense of adventure and achievement, and enjoyed the sunshine.
Then the local radio channel that was playing pop hits from the 80s and 90s switched to a news break, and the rest of the day was ruined... 'The situation in the Middle East has escalated further as the US and Israel have begun attacking Iran,' said the announcer in German. Then the music resumed.
The energy drained out of me, and I've felt pretty weepy. It's worse because Germany, the UK, and even France's governments have reacted in my view weakly; the solidarity and moral clarity that we saw during the invasion of Ukraine isn't there as a comfort. It enrages me to think of the Israeli government plane sitting on the tarmac of Berlin's airport after being evacuated from the Mediterranean for its safety, as missiles hit Israeli residents who are evidently not being treated with the same care by their government. As for the Canadian government's reaction, let's not even go there.
It's not like I care all that much what happened to the Ayatollah, but I don't think that democracy and safety for Iranians will be instilled into Tehran one bomblet at a time. And besides I have such a low opinion of Trump that I think, given the chance to liberate a Nazi concentration camp, he'd only have done so in order to build a McDonald's (or an outlet of his favourite US corporation du jour) there and use the camp survivors as cheap labour. Hopefully I'm not trivializing the Holocaust by making this comparison. To put it more reasonably, I distrust his motives — the presence of the Energy and Treasury secretaries in the White House situation room as the war began also suggests to me that a primary post-invasion aim is to annex Iran's oil — and I think that shoddy motives lead to shoddy outcomes.
The strikes on the northern coast of the Strait of Hormuz, where the girls' elementary school was hit and over a hundred people died according to the local prosecutor, are I think explained though not excused by this New York Times report. The report says that until 2016 the building was part of a naval base, but since then a wall has separated it off from the base. Satellite surveillance would surely have shown small people regularly drifting in and out before and at the end of the usual school hours? During the Clinton administrations I'm quite sure the president would have been asked to resign by multiple newspaper editorials, and likely leading Republican congresspeople, if he had started a war with this kind of gross error.
Besides it's very disconcerting even from a selfish perspective to have a president in power in the US who seems to start wars as often as, if not more often than, he sneezes. What will happen to Cuba (I think the oil embargo is already extremely cruel), Greenland, Canada, and other countries?
All in all I think the last time I felt this badly, and this depressed, about world events was after September 11th. As the ripples of this new war spread and spread, it seems to suck the joy out of life.
At the same time I have to acknowledge that this war doesn't make civilians in the Gaza Strip or Sudan or Ukraine less dead; there are also other wars going on that are no less terrible.
And, finally, not having lived in Iran myself, I also have to acknowledge that the opinions of people who have lived — and do live — there, matter more than my assessment.
Posts
