Trouble beyond the bubble

More than ever, I feel like a spoiled brat. In addition to the usual indications (eating food I don't prepare, using a bathroom I don't clean, getting an education I don't pay for), my I'm-in-a-bubble existence has remained largely undisturbed and unchanged while much of the world, with its not-in-your-bubble reality, has not.

The Iraqi Republican Guard is using Iraqi women and children as human shields, and the number of American soldiers who will be brought back in body bags is rising. Multitudes worldwide, including eight-year-old Pakistani boys bandaged like injured Iraqi children, are marching for peace. Hundreds in Asia are infected with a strain of pneumonia with no vaccine or cure, prompting the World Health Organization to issue its first global alert in a decade. And who knows what's going on in North Korea? Meanwhile, I bask in 64-degree weather, reading about Israeli cinema, munching on freedom fries (or whatever you want to call them), wondering how I am going to wake up for my ten o'clock class.

I disgust myself.

The incongruity reminds me of my channel surfing last week. Click. Protesters clogging the streets, some lying on the sidewalks in the rain. Click. Dan Rather, wrinkled with worry, giving somber monologues on Iraqi history. Click click click. Gas-masked correspondent to gas-masked correspondent to gas-masked correspondent, in vague locations with vaguer descriptions of what is going on.

Click. Piping hot popovers and a beaming Martha Stewart, cooing: "Put a chunk of room-temperature butter right inside, just like that, and sit down with a nice cup of milky coffee."

That's me, Martha Stewart. (Did I just say that?) Except I'm not making popovers from scratch; I'm talking on AIM, I'm going out for ice cream, I'm writing Chinese characters fifty times in my notebook. The New York Times prints headlines like "20 Americans Dead or Missing, 50 Hurt," and from my daily routine you'd think I didn't know there was a war. Pity me, I have overdue papers!

The inaction torments me. What is there for me to do? I guess, being a Jersey girl, I could have gone into New York City over spring break to join the demonstrations. Minor problem: I support the war. Just barely. So there goes the idea of marching in a pro-war rally, too. I'm not far enough on either side to even hand out pamphlets. What do concerned moderates do? Surely there are many of us out there!

But I've found that many people want to be undisturbed, unchanged. They don't want the war to affect even their conversation, let alone their lives. Anything and everything else — including midterm grades, dying relatives, and high-caloric foods — is a preferable topic of discussion to Iraq. These are the people who, upon mention of the conflict, give me the "enough already!" look, as if I'm a Southerner crying about the Civil War.

I hope they do care, and have made Iraq the elephant in the room for a reason. Maybe it's the stereotyping that repulses them. Being antiwar suggests that you're a baby-killing pot-smoking tree-hugging man-hating hippie, and being pro-war that you're a money-hoarding bloodsucking pearl-wearing Bible-thumping trust fund baby. And people near the middle, I think, can be just as reviled as extremists are. Oh, please. Just because I'm hesitant in my stance doesn't mean I haven't thought about it, read about it, wanted-to-do-something about it just as much as anyone else. I'm sick of zealots sneering, "Do you read the news?" Yet sometimes I wonder if it matters that I do — what would be the difference?

One day my kids will ask me what I was doing when the twin towers fell, and I will reply with embarrassment: "Choosing classes for my first semester of college, oblivious." When they ask me what I was doing when we fought a war in Iraq, I wonder what my answer will be. Doing homework in my room? Lying outside tanning? Organizing my closet to accommodate spring clothing? As the craziness of classes resumes, I worry about sinking further into this pit of self-absorption, with ever-present deadlines and peer-apathy pulling me in deeper.

The other night, after reading Xanga pages full of thesis worries and prom dresses and post-Oscar analysis, I came across an Iraqi blogger, who wrote:

"Friday, March 21, 2003: Today in the morning I went out to get bread and groceries. There were no Ba'ath party people stopping us from leaving the area where we live, this apparently happens after the evening prayers. But they are still everywhere. The streets are empty only bakeries are open . . . Meat is not safe to buy . . . The sounds of the antiaircraft artillery is still louder than the booms and bangs which means that they are still far from where we live, but the images we saw on Al Arabia news channel showed a building burning near my aunt's house."