At the protests we find both support and spite from the passersby. often, conservative guys will ask if any of us have been to war. few of us can say we have, but i have. and when i tell them what i saw they have no response. because what i saw, where i was, what i went through, it throws them off.
I remember the build up to the invasion, not this one, but the invasion of panamá in 1989, which had been preceded by two dozen invasions and one hundred fifty years of US military occupation. i remember being a child waiting on my mama at the hair salon in michigan. my mother is light-skinned, she can pass, but her heart is pure panamanian. but the hair stylist didn't know, as that woman repeated the statement that dennis miller later enacted on Saturday Night Live: "they should just wipe that country off the face of the earth." i wanted to hurt her. i wanted to hurt her for that. and i didnt understand why my mama stayed silent in the chair. but she felt the pain too. and i felt the pain years later when i saw that rerun where dennis miller took scissors and physically cut panama out of the map behind him to thunderous applause. how were we supposed to feel? the US Empire was threatening to bomb our country, our people, our relatives, her father, her sisters, her brothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, off the face of the planet in what was later the model for 'Shock & Awe,' the initial military operation in the invasion of Iraq in 2003. the US Empire was threatening to bomb it clear off the face of the planet, and US popular culture and US corporate news had successfully sold the idea of genocide to the United States population. and what of us? how were we supposed to feel? my brother's first visit to our family 'down there' was during the Noriega regime, a man much like Saddam Hussein. created by the united states, trained in ruthless brutality by the united states, paid to commit torture and repression by the united states, he had eventually begun to become independent, and now the Empire was mad. Jesse Helms and others began clamoring for blood. noriega had tortured relatives, my family protested him in the streets, but we knew the US couldnt be trusted.
Nevermind what happened. nevermind if it was four hundred or two thousand or four thousand or seven thousand panamanian civilians killed according to different estimates. nevermind that panama is and was a country with a population 1% the size of the united states, with a military created by the united states. nevermind if the country, especially the cities, especially poor neighborhoods were flattened by the bombings. that was christmastime in 1989. but id never seen my family.
No, but i saw them a few months later in 1990, when the imperial occupation was still going strong. the humiliation of a century and a half of near-colonial rule had left a bad taste amongst the panamanians. resistance was constant throughout. but in the biggest US Imperial military operation since they were defeated by the poor millions of Viet Nam, the Empire showed who was on top. like taking candy from a baby. with stealth bombers as back-up. and in the only visit where i ever saw my grandfather, he got to show us bombed out areas of the capital. blood stains on the streets. tanks in the streets. dud missiles and defeated jet fighters in the parks, where children could play on them. where i played on them. APCs rolling by. armoured imperial stormtroopers everywhere you look. and military checkpoints, the very same as those in the West Bank in Palestine, or in Iraq today.
I was eight years old when i saw war. you ask me why i protest. i aint no pacifist, and i wouldnt take away my people's right to resist invaders. i wouldn't take that right away from any poor folks in any of the world's third world ghettos. but i saw what Empire can do. and so i ask you, why aren't you in the streets with us?