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March 27, 2012 Tomgram: Chip Ward, Apologies to the Next Generation for the Turmoil to Come
[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Don’t
be fooled by Tom’s introduction this morning (pre-prepared). He
remains on the road and off the grid until Thursday, but a signed,
personalized copy of his book
The United States of Fear
will wing its way toward you on his return for a contribution of $75
(or more). A similarly signed copy of Michael Klare’s groundbreaking
new book,
The Race for What’s Left: The Global Scramble for the World’s Last Resources, is also still available (without the time lag) for a contribution of $100. Just check out the
original offer or go directly to our
donation page. Nick]
At our relatively advanced ages, Chip Ward and I couldn’t be more modern. We’ve never met, only e-met (and chatted on our cell phones). We may never meet. He lives in the backcountry of Utah and while he travels extensively, it’s not on trails I’m likely to be following, nor is it to the big city. I seldom leave New York and when I do, it’s not for Utah. Still, I feel as if, after all these years working together, we are in some sense friends on the same planet, thinking similar thoughts -- and never more so than today. After all, when I began TomDispatch.com, my impulse was strikingly similar to the one that clearly animated him to write his latest post. As a book editor, I felt I had done good work all my life, putting words into our world that made -- or at least should have made -- some small difference. But when our bombing of Afghanistan began in October 2001, the writing was already on the wall for anyone to read. Watching the Bush administration, absorbing its imperial pretensions, sensing where they might lead, knowing that we were already “at war,” and that the country was being turned into some new kind of garrison state, I suddenly felt that nothing I had done was faintly good enough. That sense actually went remarkably deep. I have a daughter and a son whose future I care about. I knew in some visceral way that we were heading into the worst years of my life, which meant theirs, too. I had a strong feeling that I simply couldn’t sit back and let them (and their peers) inherit the kind of planet I feared was in their future -- not without doing something to resist our moment. Since I’m no megalomaniac, I didn’t expect anything to come of it; I simply felt a powerful need to raise my hand, to act, even if I had no idea how. The result was a no-name listserv I began sending around late that October, first to friends and relatives and then to whoever jumped aboard. Nothing surprises me more than this: a decade-plus later, I’m still obsessively involved with its spawn, TomDispatch.com. I just had the urge to act in a way that seemed to fit with my life, an urge -- thought of another way -- to say to my children that I was sorry for the world I was leaving them. And so there is some special satisfaction in posting this letter of Chip Ward’s, a man who (unlike me) really has spent significant parts of his life trying to make this a better planet for his neighbors, children, grandchildren, and all the rest of us. Tom We Screwed Up |
