In my teens and early 20s, I fancied myself a songwriter. I have whole notebooks stashed away in my basement, first filled with 9th grade angst, and then more poetic rhythms, more thoughtful melodies.
In the lead up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, I was 20 years old, a third-year student studying software engineering at the University of Ottawa. There were protests, it seemed, all the time, a wave of them, in city after city, growing in momentum, in magnitude. I attended as many as I could, made the posters, chanted the slogans, dared to hope.
No more blood for oil.
Stop the insanity.
Hate, Greed, Ignorance, Weapons of Mass Destruction
On February 15, 2003, millions protested around the world, in over 600 cities. I was out there in Ottawa, with leftists and Raging Grannies and people who seemed to know what they were doing. That day, I started to believe that the invasion wouldn’t happen. How could it? How could a coalition of democratic countries move forward with something so clearly unpopular? On the bus home after the protest, I pulled out my writer’s notebook, scribbling away a new song, inspired.
The song’s been popping up in my mind this last week, unprompted, a soundtrack to my day as I cycle to work, make dinner, scroll through posts of death and destruction late at night. While the technology is dated, and the specific events are different, the sentiment is the same. I don’t need to tell you that the invasion of Iraq did happen. That the fog of war took over. That hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died; that thousands of Americans died; that the whole region was destabilized thanks to the invasion and has not recovered.
I haven’t figured out how to record audio on Substack yet - and while I’m sure it’s not that hard, I also haven’t sung publicly in years and would be woefully off-key if I tried. So I’m sharing the song here as a poem instead, for paid subscribers. It feels much too relevant as millions protest the destruction and the death in Gaza, and governments continue to ignore us.
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