My heart, she is broken

I wanted to sit down tonight and write how Diet Coke is the new water. I wanted, since I just spent 4 bucks on the new 598+ page Vogue, to write about fashion and how I don’t know how to say Yves Saint Laurent out loud and have this fear that one day I’ll have to say it in front of someone who knows. I wanted to write about how much I love The Isaac Mizrahi Show and about Swell by Cynthia Rowley at Target.

But I have no soul to write anymore about them today. The headlines of this past week alone made me weep in the car as NPR reminded me on the hour:

Algerian plane crash kills 97
Bus bombing in Israel kills at least 16 people
11 Killed, at least 100 Wounded in Renewed Israeli Invasion of Gaza Refugee Camp

Those headlines, syntactically loaded as they are, don't begin to cover what people around this world are suffering. Some days I am paralyzed with worry and fear and sadness.

Tonight I listened to the President give a press conference. I didn't want to listen, mainly for rhetorical reasons, but my head and heart are desperate for some kind of resolution to our current crises, and I hoped that he would somehow be given a gift to speak well and with conviction, and convince me that this omnipresent war is the only solution.

He didn't. His answers were predictably vague, laden with pause and platitudes. Most of the time he didn't answer the question posed him. It makes me more sad than angry, because I pity his inability to speak well and convince the people he leads, particularly those who consider themselves thoughtful and capable of digesting information and forming educated opinions. I am surrounded by friends, family, and co-workers who fit this description well: people who are terrifically insightful and intelligent, and who have a very concrete stance on what should happen next.

I, on the other hand, am a mess, searching anywhere for someone to convince me that what I fear is inevitable is, in fact, the right choice. I don't remember ever feeling so fractured about something over which I have no immediate control. I voted for President Bush because I found the alternative distressing, so now I feel disproportionately responsible for the decision he will make. I want to believe that his people are burdened with ultra-classified pieces of intelligence that are so frightening and so threatening that to wait another week is like taunting a bull.

But since I can't know, I instead look around and wonder how I am not quite swayed by overwhelming public opposition and by the diplomacy of Kofi Annan's beautiful liquid voice. I am tortured by the writers who find the best words to spell out the case for waiting a little longer or avoiding war altogether.

There is a great voice of reason inside me that fears a war will only add to the dread I feel each day reading the headlines on Yahoo's front page. But my other sense of reason knows that in the face of the mockery and defiance I sense under Saddam's stoic façade, our leader feels an overdeveloped need to protect a nation tenuously secure and, I think, only very nervously carrying on thinking primarily about sports and television.

It feels weak to come to no conclusion. If anything, the painful events of this week have made me stop dead still in my ability to believe either side of the war issue. I am often afraid that by not actively opposing the war with my Constitutional freedoms, I am aligning myself with a group who will have been, in some views, dead wrong when the dust settles. Yet, standing on the street with a sign doesn't feel right either. I don't know how to understand my fear of opposing my President and his advisers. It doesn't feel logical because it really isn't, so today all I know how to do is waffle and hope and wait.