Is This Freedom?
By Sheila Provencher
May 12, 2005

The air was heavy today.  Cloudy, oppressive, humid, weather rare for Baghdad.  I feel the heaviness added to the weight of the recent explosions across the country.  Yesterday, Wednesday, 71 people died in car bombs in at least three cities.

Can you imagine what it is like, every time you set out in a car across the city, to wonder if you will return?  What it is like to drive down Sadoon Street and see two overturned and burned-out cars in front of ruined storefronts ravaged by the explosions?  What it is like to be sitting in the Royal Jordanian Airlines office at the Palestine Hotel complex and you hear the ripping sound of the bombs and then you see the smoke about a half-mile away?

I feel sick, but I don't run to the bombsite because I can't do anything.  I just sit there and wonder how many people are dead, and pray for them, and for the people who set the bombs, and at the same time I feel glad that it wasn't me there on the street.  Your mind does these things.  "Thank God I made it today.  Thank God it wasn't me."  But it was someone.

I held my breath driving in a taxi with Amira and the kids today.  A wedding party rode in several cars ahead of us, with young men leaning out of the cars and atop the cars, waving guns and firing them in celebration.  The police got nervous finally and stopped one of the cars and searched it.

But it's too much. There have been too many gunshots, too many tanks rolling by in Amira's mother's neighborhood, to many sounds of target practice mixed with the sound of kids laughing in the backyard playing with newly-hatched ducklings and bleating sheep.  The family told me that "the Americans" have a base nearby and often
have target practice.  The constant gunfire makes it impossible for us to forget that we're in a war zone, even when Amira's sister shows me her wedding outfits while the T.V. plays a Sylvester Stallone movie.

Even more common now than tanks and humvees, are pickup trucks full of Iraqi National Guard soldiers, or Iraqi Police, who drive around randomly waving automatic weapons at cars and people.  The atmosphere feels more and more like that of a police state.

It is insane. Insane.  Every day I feel "I have to get out of here."  Soldiers feel that too.  I asked one last week how long he'd been here, and he said, "Too long."  What about Iraqis?  Almost all of them are stuck here.

The only way I've found to respond to the fear is to sit still, breathe, and go deep, deep, at least once per day. I try to remember that we are all together, really, and that my individual death would not stop this mysterious, beautiful Oneness that holds us. We all ARE.  When I remember that, in my body and soul, then I can hear little Huda's singing again even as I see her looking out the taxi window at the wreckage.  I can imagine the sound of the young soldier's baby laughing, even though he is thousands of miles away.  I can be breathlessly grateful that I am here to follow what I believe, that RISKING friendship and common ground is the only lasting way to reach beyond the violence that surrounds us.

"Al Hamdu l'Allah," Iraqis say all the time.  "Thanks be to God, for everything.  I wish that we could all really see God's Oneness, and be free.