After Iftar Polemic

Against Dinosaur Juice

After Iftar Polemic

Hemingway said hunger is good discipline, but I have left that century behind. Today is the fourth day of Ramadan, corresponding with April, “the cruelest month” if you consider the war in Ukraine. I could not gather words until I had broken my fast with prepackaged chicken döner, leftover baked spaghetti, and cucumber salad—Tuesday night fare in a house with two fasting English teachers and one sugar charged four year old. Still I struggle to assemble language for this moment in time. My grandfather took shrapnel at the Bulge. My father was shot up in Vietnam. I’m too old for military service. I live an hour from what’s left of Syria, so far the host of the deadliest war of this century. Here in Gaziantep, drenched in blood a century ago, we practice the arts of peace. What is that? What is peace? Here in southern Anatolia, we eat well, we go to weddings, we make babies, and we pray. Most of us. I reject hunger, the discipline of violence, and the idolatry that leads to war. I am a student of the twenty first century, when we will dignify humanity with bread and school, clean water and safe buildings. But the twentieth century is surviving everywhere the carbon economy blasphemes God’s green creation, or bombs fall on people trying to eat well, go to weddings, or make babies. The sun is shining, the wind is blowing, and small men are still dropping bombs and burning dinosaur juice. My university students ask me about what luxury car I prefer to drive. I tell them I take the train to work and walk home. I don’t play single shooter video games. I fast because thirst and hunger teaches me I should feed the hungry with charity and humanity. So in that sense, Hemingway was right. He saw too much of the last century, which ended for him at the wrong end of a shotgun. I am a student of the twenty first century so I don’t blow my own brains out, hoping that humanity will not commit suicide by carbon poisoning.