Power among the ordinary people

by Rich Moniak, Voices in Wartime Staff

"I'm sorry that your mom was killed
When a missile struck your home
You were only three, and innocent.
Your mother too was innocent.

That missile came in my name,
Paid for by my tax dollars.
I was against the bombing, but
Not registered to vote,
Afraid to make a stand."

… Pamela Hale, excerpted from "Poem for an Iraqi Child in a Forgotten News Clip"

In an interview about her poem which was used in the Voices in Wartime documentary, Pamela explains that the missile she remembered was “when the bombs first started dropping during the first Gulf War, I was at a friend's house helping her move. The television was playing in the background. One second we were casually complaining about moving boxes and the next second we were seeing news footage about bombs dropping in Iraq.”

Here again is “those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end” described by Tim O’Brien in his stories of Vietnam. For Pamela it was “a random ten-second shot of soldiers carrying a little kid away from a bombed-out house" that never went away.

What is it that haunts our memories in such ways that an ordinary moment becomes attached to an extraordinary scene then transposes itself into a source of inspiration 12 years later? Why doesn’t it let us forget?

Pamela described herself as “an ordinary person in an ordinary place” not part of a group of "crazy left-wing people who were against the war.” Of course, she never expected her poem to stop the war. But she didn't anticipate that it would become something more than just another among the thousands of poems offered in solidarity with the Poets Against the War movement. In other words, she thought of her poem in an ordinary sense too.

The word ordinary seems to want to put us in our place, to reduce our potential in life to the common, just as the word’s roots belong to the classical Latin ordinarius meaning “regular, usual, orderly”. Strangely, there the word vulgar has roots in common and ordinary as well: vulgaris "of or pertaining to the common people, common, vulgar," from vulgus "the common people, multitude, crowd, throng."

But Pamela’s poem wasn’t seen as ordinary at all, as it stood out among the multitude, the thousands of poems expressing the same truth other people passionately felt, that going to war was wrong. The word same again suggests common, as in commonly shared. But in returning the truth to common we reach clarity, for isn’t it the simplest truths within ourselves that we may be best aware of?

Among Pamela’s simple truths was the memory of “being afraid to make a stand.” She offers her honest place next to the image she saw on the news by admitting to a common fear enabled by the judgmental ideal of orderly, the warning against associating with the vulgar crowd, in today's language, the “crazy left wing people.”

Her poem reveals that those odd little fragments that have no beginning and no end have extraordinary meaning. Are they related to finding our individual destiny, our unique contribution to life, no matter how small it seems? Is the truth itself telling us we can make a difference because collectively the ordinary people are extraordinarily powerful?