Over our home in Colonie, on certain days of the week a too loud, too low, very awkward military transport plane makes practice runs, lumbering back and forth, back and forth between the Schenectady and Albany County airports.
Its roaring, its proximity make me cringe. I have found myself resenting mightily this unbidden infringement upon my space, my peace and quiet, my sense of security in my own home.
And recently, resentment has turned to a sense of impotent rage because as a full-time grandma, I find myself often in the playground at Colonie's island of green peace, "The Crossings," and by the soccer fields at Colonie High School and, frequently, this same nerve rattling, roaring behemoth appears in both places overhead. However, instead of flying a straight path, the pilots practice low, sharp banking maneuvers which cause this steel gray, uncaring machine to seem to hang for a moment coldly in the sky over the heads of my beloved boys, their playmates in the sandbox, their classmates in the school.
Every time, I feel my breath catch. The presence of that military plane hovering low above the ground "on maneuvers" above school and swings, seemingly subject, in its heft and slow speed and low banking, to mishap, feels wrong, irrational, threatening.
In conjunction with the release of a new documentary by Robert Greenwald, titled "Unmanned: America's Drone Wars,'' a family from Waziristan, including the father, Rafiq ur Rehman, who is a primary school teacher, his 9-year-old daughter, Nabila, and 13-year-old son, Zubai, traveled from Pakistan last month to speak at a congressional briefing called by Rep. Alan Grayson, D-Fla. They brought a firsthand witness to the horrifying impact of U.S. weaponized drone strikes on innocent civilians like themselves of whom hundreds have been similarly slaughtered over the past few years in Pakistan alone.
Last year at this time, in preparation for the harvest feast, the children joined their grandmother, Momina Bibi, a midwife, in the field to pick okra. Though often aware of the intimidating drone of these robotic machines overhead, the family, secure in its own sense of innocence, was unprepared for the hellfire that descended on them unexpectedly when a drone fired missile struck them followed swiftly by a second. When the dust and the cries for help subsided, eight relatives, including the children, were found to be wounded and their grandmother, whom the father passionately called the "soul of our family," dead, her body burned and torn beyond recognition. There has been no attempt since then by any government or agency to explain this drone-wrought devastation to this grieving family.
Heart seared by the pain of loss and the challenge of his trying to explain to his children the inexplicable, sickened by the loss of a fundamental sense of the security and safety of home that has occurred for so many civilians in his region as the drone toll rises, Rafiq traveled to Washington, seeking redress by trying to convince congressmen of the imperative to reign in these horribly misguided missiles.
Fiercely articulating the illegality, the immorality and the counter-productive nature of the use of drones and begging along with his scarred children for a change in the policy that supports and condones such strikes, Rafiq's words echoed the conclusions of three separate international reports that have been issued regarding the use of weaponized drones during the past two weeks alone.
There is, I fear, an explanation. A compass has gone askew, the moral compass that when pointing true tells us when our worship of war as a substitute for wise foreign policy and its lethal ever-expanding soulless technology is leading us into a legal, moral, spiritual abyss.
These extrajudicial killings enabled by a technology that has been sold to Congress by a collusion of drone industry lobbyists and the government officials whose pockets they line might not result ... at least at the moment ... in hellfire reigning from the skies over Colonie.
Yet, just as those poorly plotted maneuvers over our children's heads remind us that we are at war, the senseless murder of a grandmother thousands of miles away in our name should remind us that there is a terrifying threat that the horrors we model, condone and justify today are shaping a dystopian future for them where the commitments to human rights and law are quaint, outmoded notions that can be shredded and burned beyond recognition because ... well, because we can.
Maureen Baillargeon Aumand of Colonie is a member of Women Against War.