I’ve written about war for much of my career: from the warrior saint, Joan of Arc to Napoleon in exile on St Helena, from the destruction of the library in Louvain, Belgium in the first days of WWI, to four very young survivors encountering each other in the last days of the Civil War. I’ve even written a comedy about Civil War re-enactors who get their fondest wish and fall through a hole in time.
War has been a concern, a passion, and a preoccupation as I’ve tried, again and again to answer the very simple question: why?
I grew up when the general populace still paid attention to the war we were fighting, and I vividly remember my parents’ stories of their sacrifices during WW II. I think of how different our lives would be if we were all asked to contribute to the wars we are fighting, whether through taxes or Victory Gardens, or rationed commodities. Would we notice what is being done in our name?
This is a new era, when the burdens of our wars are borne by 1% of the population while 99% of us can live our lives as though the wars are not happening. The costs of war have become hidden. Do we actually support these wars or ten years in, have we lulled ourselves into forgetting them? This luxury of not paying attention is untenable, unfair and unsustainable. And it is far too easy to salve our conscience with bumper stickers.
I have a vision: that a world without war would mean fully funded schools, libraries, environmental protections, new energy research and development and innovation, flourishing public universities, state of the art Veteran’s hospitals, updated infrastructure, and on and on. Think of what we, as a nation, could afford to do, in our own country and through global aid, if we were not spending 300 million dollars per day in Afghanistan alone.
In writing Alice Bliss, my question became: How can I write about the hidden costs of war? How can I write about this issue that I care so intensely about, and make it palatable to the reader? I asked myself: whose experience is most hidden from us? Whose story have we not heard? Who is most invisible? The families and the children who are left behind.
If we open our minds and our hearts to the human costs of war (independent of the political and financial costs) and allow ourselves to experience that emotional trauma, maybe we will begin to connect the dots and see the relationship between our actions and suffering, both at home and abroad.
I have the optimism that our tolerance for war can be changed one person at a time, one reader at a time, one 15-year-old girl like Alice Bliss at a time.
If I can put the war in your lap, in the pages of a book, in the voice of a girl who is desperately misses her father who is serving in Iraq; perhaps a seed can be planted. A seed of hope, a seed of change.