by Harris Sussman

There's been no peace in my lifetime as an American.

I was born on the island of Manhattan. Signs and portents. I was bornbetween Auchswitz and Hiroshima.

World War Two segued into the Cold War. I don't know if fear of nuclear war had any effect on the Soviet Union but it sure affected me. The background radiation of the Manhattan Project has followed me everywhere I've gone.

Was I born with post-traumatic stress disorder? No, my mother said Iwas a happy baby. She must have done a good job distracting me. At least I didn't notice the Korean War.

I didn't repeat any countries even though we had repeated engagementswith some. I may have left out some.

In January 1961, President/General Eisenhower said, "In the councils ofgovernment, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarrantedinfluence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrialcomplex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power existsand will persist."

We were in the Cold War more than 40 years. We have been in a war withCuba for 39 years and counting. We have been in an ongoing war withIraq for 10 years.

Economists talk about the peacetime expansion of the U.S. economy. There hasn't been a time in my life when the U.S. was not involved inkilling people in my name somewhere in the world. Yet this passes forpeace. I think this is because U.S. military activity has always beenglobal, mostly out of sight, away from home.

When I was my son's age the U.S. government was killing Buddhists inthe jungles of Southeast Asia. Now it is killing Muslims in themountains of Southwest Asia. This is what this "Judeo-Christian"country keeps doing while pledging allegiance to its flag, singingpatriotic songs, and invoking its variant of God, a Supreme Being.

These things go on simultaneously. The military activity is constantand continuous. That is why the military budget is so large, more than$350 billion this year. "Pentagon spending now accounts for over half(50.5%) of all discretionary spending," says the Center for DefenseInformation. "Global military spending has declined from $1.2 trillionin 1985 to $809 billion in 1999. During that time the U.S. share oftotal military spending rose from 31% to 36% in Fiscal Year 1999."

I live in a country whose economy is dominated by military activity, bya preoccupation with killing people in other parts of the world, whichhas become the formal occupation of many people and the informaloccupation of many more. This is our routine activity, not only in themilitary, because of course it spills over into other sectors as well. It pervades education and corporate business. Organized religion inthis secular democracy seems to have both military and civilianbranches.

If this isn't always on our minds that is an indication of howeffectively we block it out. It is remarkable that concurrently withsuch government-administered killing, so much else goes on in thesociety. But it is precisely our insulation from the facts of this sideof American life that accounts for the inability of so many people tobelieve or understand what happened on Sept. 11.

We are in a state of denial much of the time, it seems. We choose notto think about the thousands of nuclear warheads in our government'sarsenal, the radioactive nuclear waste, the chemical and biologicalweapons stockpiles. We'd rather not think about that, which means weleave the burden of thinking about it to others. "At the beginning of1996, there were some 21,000 operational nuclear weapons in the world,"says Greenpeace.

And then Sept. 11 happens. Much of people's reaction, I think, istheir struggle with themselves not to think about these things. We hatewhat happened on Sept. 11 because it's like the elephant in the livingroom. It's impossible to ignore. When we hear that Sept. 11 changedeverything, that means that it made it necessary for Americans to thinkabout and deal with a lifetime of things they find unpleasant and try sohard to avoid. But it has caught up with us. The crematorium in lowerManhattan is still burning. It has become our eternal flame. My lifehas come full circle.

Harris Sussman lives in Somerville Massachusetts.

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