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| THE HANDSTAND | APRIL 2003 |
| The Girl With Flowers in Her
Hair by LISA WALSH THOMAS March 17, 2003  She's the
nightmare that's been clawing at your sleep lately,
George W, and she's ... coming to get you! You may have caught electrifying glimpses of her on television at one of the hundreds of huge protests around the world in the past couple of months. Just one of millions, of course, but what she's so good at is enduring. Nightmares are bad, yes, but nightmares that ENDURE are the stuff that brings down kings and empires, and we're talking REAL kings, George. She's been everywhere recently, just like in the old days. You remember the sixties, long before Robert McNamara finally came clean about it, and the demonstrations against letting our classmates die in the jungle in order to kill a million Vietnamese who chose to be far left of center and ... well okay, so she wasn't your kind of girl. You weren't into protests or peace or causes, that kind of thing. God was preparing you  for grander
missions, some say. You were to be the messiah, others
speculate. In your idleness of those years, unknown even
to you, who would be designated THE implementing tool, a
malignant, dark plan was spawned. But SHE, George, was busy all that time. Recently, I watched her down in Austin, Texas, rising above the restrained calls for sanity, starting to dance to the beat of drums and chanting of the madding crowd. The flowers in her hair may have been only a tribute to bygone culture, but they were there, resurrected, fresh as the blush on your face when you were told that YES, Mr. Resident, there are black people in Brazil, or NO, Mr. Resident, those aluminum tubes in Iraq are not designed for nuclear weapons, or BUT Chairman Bush, the U.N. members are objecting to our bugging of their offices, or PLEASE Mr. Chairman, too many people have found out that those reports of Iraq seeking to buy uranium from Niger were FORGED. After the rally in Austin on February 15, after the long 10,000 person march from the capital, hundreds stopped on a bridge in the middle of Austin to dance. The seeming frivolity was a picture of people WIRED. They weren't solemnly standing there. Imagine "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" in the mouth of Ozzie Osbourne.  It may be her growing
omnipresence that's keeping you awake, George, and who
can blame you? There were silent times, true, but her
ability to resurrect herself at will is uncanny, nearly
apocalyptic. She was there when Ronald Reagan tried to
tell us that his contra terrorists were "freedom
fighters." She marched around the U.S. embassy in
Managua when the media back home tried to tell us that an
army might be needed to "liberate" the people
of Nicaragua, who had been given guns by President Daniel
Ortega in order to defend themselves against invading
forces from the north. She helped stop that invasion as
surely as she helped stop the Vietnam War. In recent years, she's marched in Seattle and Italy. She helped overthrow the U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela. She was in Guatemala a couple of years ago when the people revolted against a new sales tax, and she helped shut down that country for 24 hours that the U.S. media forgot to report. She exposed General Pinochet for the corrupt dictator we installed in Chile after U.S. participation in the probable murder of the democratically-elected Dr. Allende. She's been in London lately to expose the lack of support for Tony Blair. San Francisco, Paris, Rome, Madrid, small towns with unpronounceable names and strange languages. Even Antarctica. She spreads the word: the most powerful country in the world along with a Prime Minister who has no support from his people, along with 50 soldiers from Bulgaria does not a "coalition" make. It's a stretch to try to include Spain and Portugal, who talk but provide no fighters.  When young people see her, when
they grab their ink markers and posterboard to recreate
the time when they told their elders to make love not
war, they are showing a value shift that we haven't seen
in thirty years, when we broke out of the stifling,
material smugness and intellectual vacuity of the
fifties. They are endorsing her as the greater cause- the peace and justice that is not economically advantageous to the corporate crowd. Those who are coming of age with a world awareness agree with our girl, who considers throwing live nuns out of helicopters in Honduras a violation of human rights, even if it WAS of no concern to Ambassador John Negroponte. So they are looking at her, down into her soul, George W., and what they're seeing is far more ablaze with life-affirming veracity than what you ever DARED speak of when you peeked into Mr. Putin's soul. She was there to spit on the 88-to-2 Gulf of Tonkin resolution for the lie it was based on. And the would-be grandeur of that lust to kill finally drowned in the spit she generated in those who followed her. While some worried about Nebraskans having to speak Chinese, she made certain that Laotians and Vietnamese and Chinese and Mongolians didn't have to speak English. She goes way back, George, way back before the history your advisors have tried to teach you in the past two years. She marched in Selma, Alabama; she was in Montgomery. She was hanging out with a Russian foot soldier in World War I and helped him to make a U-turn and head home to take his country from the czar. Some say she was in Boston Harbor in 1774, dressed as a Mohawk Indian, helping to heave almost ten thousand pounds (sterling) worth of Darjeeling tea into the water. She's a mystery to you, George W., because you are an intellectual and emotional and  spiritual troglodyte, able to
know only that she's in your way, so you must try to kill
her. You are unable to fully comprehend that she is the
PEOPLE and that, in the end, however long it takes,
however many have to die for freedom and justice, the
PEOPLE triumph over the greed of megalomaniacs who would
despoil the planet to control them. You think that if she opens up her mouth to sing aloud, you're going to hear only an old scratched LP, a Woody Guthrie protest song. That  thought belongs
in the bag with most of your expressed thoughts, Mr.
Chairman. When she opens her mouth, what you will see are
birds. Then you will see that they are doves. And then
you will see that even doves, when fighting for their
lives, can grow fangs. Of COURSE you have to try to stop her. Within hours of these words being written, you will probably have given the green light to your killing machine and its first 400 missiles, overkill for "liberating" the cradle of civilization and a dying, defenseless nation, half of which is children. Somewhere near a river contaminated by your generals' earlier waste products, a little girl will leave her playthings abandoned as she runs for  her mother, as
she hears her father call out for her little brother
amidst a roar of sound that is understood even in her
young mind as the sound signalling the final seconds of
her short life, the final seconds for her parents to look
at each other without the time to even say goodbye, all
for the oil that is beneath their little hut, and for the
stepping stone that oil is to world control. This little girl will probably be dead by the time most people read this, and some in this country will clap and cheer you on, calling you a war hero, and you'll consider yourself victorious, and you can return to strutting mode. But in time this child will rise from the dead, stronger, wiser, the maddening flowers reblooming in her hair. You can tear off her limbs, and new ones will be generated. You can blind her with your poisons, and someone else will be her eyes. You can use the greatest arsenal of killing material humankind has ever imagined, and she will creep among the mangled dead in some other wasteland, and she'll be creeping toward YOU, George W.  You can stop her for awhile with 800 missiles and a couple of MOABs, and you can stop her again with nuclear weapons that can turn a Garden of Eden into hell, and you can poison her and her family and her neighbors with your own endless and illegal chemical weapons. You can tear out her tongue and rape and pillage and steal everything she holds dear. You can tear her country wide apart and bury thousands in each explosion that rips through her heart. But you cannot kill her. Lisa
Walsh Thomas is a veteran activist, poet, arts critic,
and political writer, wishing to dedicate these
particular words to the memory of Philip Berrigan, who
committed eight major acts of civil disobedience between
1980 and 1999, always predicting what we are now facing
-- and to his friend, Compaņero Joe M, wherever he is. |
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