Chris Hedges is Overrated

October 24, 2007
Amman, Jordan

I don't mean to freak you out (OK, fine, just a little), but I'm moving tomorrow. Yes, I said I would be in Amman until March, but ciricumstances change. I've spent the last four days in my room, with my phone turned off, and I'm pretty sure my roommates think I'm a vampire and/or dead. It's a good thing I keep a stash of diet coke and nutella in my wardrobe, right? Anyway, the last month has been an emotional version of musical chairs and while I contemplated going back to the United States, the only two people I would speak with (and no, one of them was not myself) in the last ninety-six hours have voted. I'm staying in the region, but leaving the country. Really, it's for my sanity.

In the aformentioned hours of solitude, Chomsky, Fisk, Said, and Chris Hedges kept me company. They have spoken: It's now or never, people. I'm already having doubts about the whole career goal, and now is a good time as ever to test it out. Mainly, these war correspondents/political scientists are getting on my last nerve. Please, someone explain to me how Hedges can end a work that ravages every aspect of war and conflict with, "But love, in its mystery, has its own power. It alone gives us meaning that endures. It alone allows us to embrace and cherish life. Love has power both to resist in our nature what we know what we must resist, and to affirm what we know we must affirm. And love, as the poets remind us, is eternal."

ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

Yeah, we need hope, blah blah blah and a reason to fight and live, but really? I mean...really?
Did I pick up Shakespeare by accident or is this really the man who has trampeled all parts of the earth to cover death by the masses? I'm pretty sure, also, that you, Dayna, adore this man. He is everything you stand for and maybe this is why you are better cut out for this profession than I am. I, however, did not manage to see love in Pristina where an entire culture has been massacared, or in Belgrade where hatred still rules minute ethnic differences, or did not feel it in the abandoned, posh streets of downtown Beirut where only soldiers care to venture anymore. And I most certainly do not expect to feel it tomorrow when I wait twelve hours under the sun to enter a territory with hundreds of others who this land belongs to, but are handpicked to enter after hours of pain and embarassment.

OK, so this man knows more than I do and has seen more of the world, history, culture than I have, but I doubt the end/reason to conflict is so simple. Also, I am not that much of a cynic that I expected him to write that we, as a humanity, are doomed. But this?

But I digress, I'm moving. Sorry for the last few days' hibernation, but I will get back to you soon and will write once I reach my destination.