An essay I read this morning and a movie I watched this afternoon both energized and uplifted me so much that I spent much of the day in a sort of transformational fugue state, my mind adrift and yet my thoughts focused. 

I have a unique and unusual situation out here; I am alone much of the time.  My kids are grown and live far away from home.  Today, I'm bundled up against the first ice storm of the season in my solitary rock house on a sprawling west Texas hillside while my husband is away on business.  My profession enables me to work out of a home office and set my own hours, so I have the luxury of TIME, time to read, time to think, time to sort out. 

I also have the SPACE to do this thinking and reading--there are literally no neighbors around me.  I can walk for miles with the dogs across wind-swept pastures, rugged aroyos, and deep cedar-breaks without meeting a soul.  (To this day, I miss my horses as much as my kids.  We no longer have any, but I can testify there are few companions in life more faithful, patient, and affectionate.  I refer, of course, to the horses.)

Then I have been gifted with the ability to put the conclusions I come to into words that seem to resonate and echo with others who would be able to do the same thing if they only had the time and solitude to think things out.  

Sometimes, though, such solitary pursuits can lead to a dark night of the soul, when the lack of companionship gives one no bounce-back for their doubts and fears; fatigue can set in and a certain hopelessness and circular thinking.

At times like that, other writers and thinkers can send in reinforcements and give battle-fatigued warriors some support and maybe a bit of rabble-rousing to keep us all going.

Every few weeks, it seems, there are headlines to the effect that another war-funding bill has gone before Congress and the president is threatening and the Republicans are obstructing and the Democrats are caving and soldiers and Marines are still dying even as the population refuses to budge on its majority-desire to end the war.  Just the other day, the L.A. Times ran a poll that clearly showed a large majority of military families think the war was a mistake and want it to end.

Gone, it seems, are the days of 100,000 protesters thronging the streets of New York or wherever.  The entire country seems to have sunk into a glaze-eyed trance of resignation that the idiot-in-chief is gonna do what he's gonna do and there's nothin' anybody else can do about it so why bother?

The so-called (White House ghost-written) Petraeus Report presented to the Congress and the media with much hoopla and fanfare, followed by indisputable evidence that the Bush-termed "surge" has indeed tamped down some of the worst of the violence in Baghdad, to much triumphant we-told-you-so howling by the right-wing, seems to have broken the back of the resisters.  Even the most vocal anti-war activists seem to have hung up their spurs.

So it would be easy to assume that the war to end the war has, itself, ended.  And many in the media and in the political scene seem to be assuming that same thing.

They would be wrong.

The war to end the war hasn't gone so much underground as it has infiltrated the system and is working its way inside-out instead of ramming itself against the barricades from the outside-in.

When ramparts fail to give way under determined assault, an underground tunnel leading straight to the heart of the fort can be even more effective.

I remember once, during my Christian evangelical days, when I was teaching at a conservative fundamentalist school in Florida, I had a roommate who had attended Bob Jones University.  (Yeah, THAT school.)  I kept getting so upset at what I saw as authoritarian hypocrisy at the school and was running an insurgent campaign to gather as many disgruntled teachers together as I could so we could meet with the board of directors and present our complaints.  After all, when teachers got together, that's all any of them did was bitch about that school and its autocratic headmaster.

But when I pressed them for a sign of common courage, every last one ran away and hid.  They did not want to put their jobs on the line.  I met with the school board alone, and then I quit.  I was told later that all the changes I'd suggested were indeed made and that the headmaster was gone just a few weeks after I left.

But at the time, I felt very alone and every exhausted.  The fight almost broke my spirit and my health.  And I remember my roommate telling me that I had to learn to fight my battles from within the system.  She pointed out that the harsh rules for students at Bob Jones would drive anyone insane if they didn't know how to game the system in order to do what they wanted.

It made sense but I just didn't know how to do that.  Or maybe I lacked the patience.  I did it my way and managed to help bring about change to the system, but the fight almost destroyed me and my faith.

This war to end the war had a similar effect on my sanity and my health.  At one point, my rage was so all-consuming that my husband was seriously frightened that the fight was going to kill me.  He was afraid I'd have a heart attack and die or some other dreadful fate if I didn't find a way to deal.  He did not understand that, for me, political activism and writing WERE my way to deal.  I mean, he understood it but he still worried.

Back in August, I wrote a blogpost in which I said I would write no further on the war, because it was going to continue until Bush left office.  Some of my friends did not understand--they thought I was giving up the fight.

Ah, but that was not the case at all.  I was simply taking it to the tunnel.

This morning, a post I read on Huffingtonpost.com, with the somewhat unweildy title of, Time to Dismantle the War and the Constitution of Television, by Matt Stoller, did a FAR better job of putting into words what I'd been trying to say back in August.

We may not be pouring out into the streets any more to assault the fort, but we're digging like hell to break into it:

And after wallowing in some frustration over mistakes progressives have made, I'm coming around to the view that we are working hard to end the war. Whether you are working to elect Democrats, fighting on progressive issue advocacy, registering voters, stopping military recruitment, engaging for media reform, running for office, doing voter integrity work, trying to pass good energy legislation or universal health care, you are working to end the war. We just have to begin to understand our political work that way.  

This is the point I'd been trying to make before--that working our hearts out to elect as many Democrats congresspeople and senators as we can, and put a Democrat in the White House, would be the best way possible to end this war, because we would no longer have to deal with the supreme frustration of coming up with a filibuster-proof or veto-proof majority to fight this waraholic White House and its Republican enablers.

The biggest mistake made by antiwar groups and progressives in the spring of 2007 was looking for one big moment to cut funding for the conflict, and assuming that could put enough pressure on Bush to remove troops. I cheered on the strategy, so it's not like I'm saying 'I told you so', and I'm also not saying that the strategy failed. The Republicans are tied to Iraq, they are on the record voting to sustain the war repeatedly, and we were able to identify Bush Dogs as a problem to be solved. And it's quite possible that the pressure Republicans felt has led to a dramatic decline in the possibility that we are going to war in Iran. Certainly the 2006 elections, which led to Rumsfeld's ouster, weakened Cheney's hand.

Stoller goes on to present an excellent analysis of a number of progressive victories of recent months, including drawing attention to media monopolies and shutting down their attempts at more message control.

The internet is less likely to be destroyed by the people who sent us to war every day, and the institutions of journalism are being reformed both in a positive sense through new citizen journalism initiatives like Off The Bus and Talkingpointsmemo, and in a negative sense in the criticisms of the punditocracy and talking heads.

The blogosphere arose at the same time as the media reform movement, and Moveon grew and became even more powerful at the same time, expanding to media issues, internet policy, privacy, as well as antiwar work.

He goes into a fascinating background study of the history of liberalism from the 30's on, what happened to it, and how it's working today.

As he concludes, he wraps his point brilliantly:

Ending the war means fighting against this long and aggressive tide of war. It means moving us off of a carbon economy, which will probably be profitable and allows as Van Jones notes wealth to be distributed more evenly. It means restoring civil liberties and repairing the military, removing the incentives for war in the form of for-profit war making bodies like Blackwater. It means ending torture and engaging with the rest of the world through treaties like the Law of the Sea. It means electing more Democrats, and better Democrats, and holding their feet to the fire to ensure that they investigate everything when they finally have power. It means standing up against corporate interests in 2009, and framing the 2010 election as corporations versus Democrats.

Most of all, it means rethinking how we relate to each other. As John Edwards says, it's time to be patriotic about something other than war. A society that values public service values teachers and firemen, it values politicians and librarians, artists and engineers and entrepreneurs, and it values children and people. It does not value hedge fund managers, consultants, mercenaries, think tank experts, and billionaires.

What he is saying, basically, is that WE ARE ALREADY DOING THESE THINGS, and the tide of public opinion is swinging in our direction, which means more and better chances of peppering Congress with like minds who will stop this reckless squandering of blood and treasure on a country and a government that seems only too happy to allow our soldiers and Marines to act as their personal bodyguards to keep the Green Zone safe so they can bicker in parliament and take month-long vacations when it suits them, even as the "evildoers" who were run out of town in Baghdad show up in other, less well fortified, areas of the country in an endless game of whack-a-mole.

(In the next few days I'm going to post a major blogpost on just exactly what Bush's troop escalation is accomplishing, what it can never accomplish, and what it means for the war and for the political future of our country.)

So, we are winning the war to end the war.  We're just not doing it in the same way we were in the beginning.  But we are winning, make no mistake about it.

We just need, as my old roommate pointed out, patience.

This afternoon I watched the movie, Amazing Grace.  Directed by Michael Apted and produced by the same people who did the movie, Ray, it tells the amazing and inspiring story of William Wilberforce, a political activist in England and member of the House of Commons in the late eighteenth century, who fought for more than TWENTY YEARS, (with the help of his old college buddy, William Pitt, who became the youngest prime minister in the history of Great Britain), to end the slave trade. 

In the beginning of Wilberforce's struggle, he could only count one or two allies in the House of Commons, and there was a powerful pro-slavery lobby, run largely by the sugar trade, who had most of the House of Lords as well in its pocket.  He tried everything, from educating the British people on the horrors of the slave trade, to collecting hundreds of thousands of signatures on petitions, to arguing passionately on the House floor for his cause.

The battle consumed and almost destroyed him; he suffered chronic, crippling stomach pain and, at times, a towering despair.

After fifteen years or so, the fight still seemed hopelessly lost, so he and his little band of brave warriors came at it "sideways," by slipping through the House a bill that seemed dry and boring and completely unrelated.  It was complicated but had to do with ships flying the flags of other countries to avoid being boarded and searched--which, it turns out, was the practice of slave ships.  Making such a practice illegal opened them up to search and seizure and effectively squeezed the life out of the trade.

It took several more years after that for Parliament to finally outlaw the slave trade, and more years after for it to outlaw slavery altogether, which it did a month after Wilberforce died, at the age of 74.

But I learned from watching that movie that the most powerful and righteous battles--even those against almost overpowering interests--can be won if we persist, retain our passion...and come at it sideways.

Judging from the mass exodus of Republican congresspeople and senators into "retirement" (or prison); the fourfold fundraising prowess of the Democratic party to the Republican; the comfort of Democrats for their presidential candidate field versus the bickering and apathy of the Republicans for theirs...the generational movement of the evangelicals away from "social" issues like abortion and gay rights into more Democratic ones like concern for health care and climate change...and the steadfast backing of the American people to get the hell out of Iraq--all point toward great hope of changing the system from within.

Just as Wilberforce spent many years fighting in a very public way to educate people about the reality of slavery so that he had public opinion on his side before he began his little act of legal sabotage against slave ships, so we who want to see this war end had to pour out into the streets; we had to speak out; we had to blog and write and scream and cry.

We had to make sure that truth won out over propaganda.

Now, we're starting to come at it sideways.  It may look as though we've given up, but looks can be deceiving.

And wars to end evil of all kinds can, eventually, be won.