so i found out that we were bombing kosovo from my mom. most of my news flashes come from people i know, then i scurry around and look stuff up on the web and see what i can find out.

it was over dinner, and my sister's friend's mom, this woman who might be the Ugliest American in my social circle, started doing this whole well that part of the world is always killing each other so who cares thing. it was one of the rare times that i've seen my mom lose her temper over world politics; she started talking about how recent that racial hatred is. my best friend in the fourth grade, helen, was from Yugoslavia and Serbian; we were too little to talk about politics but i guess her mom and my mom did.

my first thought was to worry about helen and her family. i haven't kept in touch, i've run into her a few times over the last few years; the weirdest connection is that she had her jaw broken at about the same time i did. hers was in a car accident, mine was from a beating. anyhow we stood in rite aid and talked about it for 20 minutes and from the way she talked i knew she'd gone through the same aftermath that i had. that survival-bonding thing, i guess, i recognized the guilt and self-loathing that goes with being hurt sometimes. i'm not sure if it was in the way she moved or in her eyes.

my mom said she'd run into helen's mom recently at the drug store, and she had been worried about the anti-Serbian sentiment she was running into. as soon as i heard about the bombings i started worrying about them. i phoned the next day, left a message on the machine hoping that they're doing okay. haven't heard back and i didn't really expect to, i figure they're probably going crazy right now--but i wanted them to hear a friendly voice from the neighborhood, in case they're feeling as hunted and paranoid as i do whenever we step up bombing against iraq. i haven't heard about any hate crimes against u.s. people from yugoslavia. i hope that it's cause there aren't any, that there hasn't been the same build-up of hatred that makes arabs such targets. but i don't know, i do know that even if hate crimes are on the rise i won't hear about it from any mainstream news sources, and i'm worried.

this is a lot more personal, i guess trivial in a way, than most of the stuff i find on the web. i don't know enough about this situation to say what the u.s. should be doing, though i believe that it is evil for us to be bombing civilians and i have been trying to find out more about what's going on. but since what i am an expert on is the personal connections, the way this intersects with my life, that's what i'm going to talk about here.

i don't think i had written about it on this web site, for awhile i was frantically trying to get visas for my grandmother and cousins to come visit us for a couple of months. turkey was actively threatening to invade syria; lining troops up on the borders not far from my family's village. the reason that they gave for an invasion was that syria had sheltered members of the resistance to turkey's ethnic cleansing. of course the u.s. didn't do anything about that. i couldn't get my family in, either. i figured they could take a vacation, visit my family, and be safe for a couple months, but i was told that the u.s. doesn't allow unmarried arab women to visit.

so i still don't know why we've singled out this group of people to care about; and why we're showing that we care by bombing civilians. it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. i guess i'm part of the knee-jerk left that condemns war automatically. i'm wondering about other ways to try to affect the situation, alternatives to bombing. i'm thinking about the people who are being killed in kosovo, about the aftermaths of bombings, about the people who are going to survive and struggle for years to rebuild, those who will survive and struggle to make lives in exile, and about all of the work that will need to be done by people moving through flashbacks and mourning.

and knowing that i live in an immigrant nation, i'm also thinking about how it's affecting my friends and the people who live in my neighborhood.