I ran across photographer Daniel Pepper’s column explaining why he regrets having gone to Iraq to serve as a “human shield.” (Actually, the headline — possibly not his responsibility — reads, “I was a naive fool to be a human shield for Saddam.”) I appreciate Pepper’s ambivalence about the exercise; the situation involves brutal complications, and ambivalence seems an appropriate response.
More than his ambivalence, though, I appreciated the conversion he experienced, from a somewhat starry-eyed romance of sacrifice and Iraqi antio-war unanimity to a more nuanced recognition that some Iraqis welcome the war and that the Hussein regime tries to manipulate the volunteers for their advantage. Thank heaven that there’s one fewer observer supposing that either the pro-war or anti-war position involves nothing more than unquestionably just international politics (on one hand) or putting flowers in rifle barrels (on another). Oversimplifying the situation doesn’t help anyone understand what’s up, and it seems as though Pepper has experienced a radical enrichment of his perspective.
At the same time, readers ought not suppose that every volunteer enters Iraq with as quaint a naïveté as did Daniel Pepper. The daughter of my old grad-school comrade Jonathan Wilson today arrived in Iraq with her new husband (well, they’ve been married for a few months, but that’s still new) not as “human shields” but as participants in a Christian Peacemaker Team. Leah and Jonathan (her husband, not [yet] my friend) explicitly note that they expect to be manipulated or even killed by an Iraqi government that may do anything to serve its propagandistic purposes. They aren’t going with daisies braided in their hair; they’re going to make visible, palpable, the possibility of confronting evil without violence. They’re going to live out their communion with Iraqi civilians (and from what I gather, many Iraqi soldiers) who want nothing to do with guns, bombs, propaganda, Saddam, or Bush. They’re going so that fewer people will feel free to shrug off civilian casualties as inevitable collateral damage from munitions delivery systems. Leah and Jonathan will surely learn more about the situation in Iraq from the time they spend in Baghdad, but their commitment to peacemaking and communion has little to do with Pepper’s disabused humanitarianism.
I’l be praying for them, for all whose lives are touched by the war, civilians, soldiers, politicians; for peace; and for an deep understanding that grows where patience and nonviolence help make room for us to listen and learn.
Posted by AKMA at March 25, 2003 02:58 PM | TrackBackThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Christiana at January 13, 2004 01:28 AMThis back and forth is an important concept to understand in C programming, especially on the Mac's RISC architecture. Almost every variable you work with can be represented in 32 bits of memory: thirty-two 1s and 0s define the data that a simple variable can hold. There are exceptions, like on the new 64-bit G5s and in the 128-bit world of AltiVec
Posted by: Roland at January 13, 2004 01:28 AMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Jocosa at January 13, 2004 01:28 AMThis will allow us to use a few functions we didn't have access to before. These lines are still a mystery for now, but we'll explain them soon. Now we'll start working within the main function, where favoriteNumber is declared and used. The first thing we need to do is change how we declare the variable. Instead of
Posted by: Cesar at January 13, 2004 10:22 AMThese secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
Posted by: Francis at January 13, 2004 10:22 AMLet's take a moment to reexamine that. What we've done here is create two variables. The first variable is in the Heap, and we're storing data in it. That's the obvious one. But the second variable is a pointer to the first one, and it exists on the Stack. This variable is the one that's really called favoriteNumber, and it's the one we're working with. It is important to remember that there are now two parts to our simple variable, one of which exists in each world. This kind of division is common is C, but omnipresent in Cocoa. When you start making objects, Cocoa makes them all in the Heap because the Stack isn't big enough to hold them. In Cocoa, you deal with objects through pointers everywhere and are actually forbidden from dealing with them directly.
Posted by: Mable at January 13, 2004 10:22 AM