To be Great You Build Not Destroy

I was at the Syrian Consulate in Geneva getting my VISA for a three-week visit to that country. This will be my second trip. The first was one of those life changing experiences that knocks preconceived concepts over forever. What I found was more than a history and culture that was extraordinary but a warmth and understanding from the many people I met. Unlike the average tourist I have the good fortune to stay with families that have become almost like family to me.

Many people have told me not to go, and I do admit to some worry with the situation so volatile at the moment. I would prefer to travel on another passport, but I don’t have one, although I hope to by the end of the year.
It took 23 hours to get the VISA.

The Syrian consulate has no security guards unlike the American center (See my blog Absurdity of Fear over Love). As for the consulate in Geneva it is surrounded by guards and barbed wire. You ring, and without a check the Syrians let you in.
As I was leaving I met a man in the elevator who had also been in the consulate.
“Sind Sie Swiss?” he asked.

“Nein, Americanishe.”

“Iraqi,” he said showing me his passport.

Growing up in America I read a lot of history, but it was words on a page.

When my daughter spent a year in Germany, her host father told me of being a boy outside Dresden and watching the Allies destroy everything he knew.

When I first went to work in Geneva, a Jewish woman, told me of being a child in France during WWII. Her mother and she were shopping, and her mother urged her to move faster, but she held back, whining. The mother was grabbed and put in a concentration camp. The war ended a few days before the mother was due to be shipped East.

In Garmish, where my cousin worked as an American Army Nurse, she took me to a chapel where every bit of space had the photo of a man or boy killed from this small town in WWII. Each face represented the pain of a mother, wife, sister, daughter. As we said in the 60s, “War is not good for living creatures.”

It is one thing to read about history, another thing to see it through the eyes of someone who is in front of you.

The Iraqi spoke neither French nor English and as we walked to the street he continued in German, “My mother was killed by an American bomb on March 25.”

“Enschuligan fur mein Land,” I said. My German is not good. I could not tell him how ashamed I am of my country for the hundreds of thousands of people we have killed not just in Iraq but in other countries. I am ashamed of my country for what we are doing to our own people making financial survival on a daily basis harder and harder. I am ashamed that we are not taking responsibility for eating up the world’s natural resources much like pac man ate up little dots. I am angry, that the country’s ideals that I was brought up to believe in no longer exist.

Back home I received a newspaper talking about General Tommy Frank who gave a speech and how he said the US was the greatest land. To me greatest means you build, you don’t destroy. You don’t bomb an old woman on March 25th.