It was a beautiful spring day, warm with a light breeze. We spent the afternoon clearing a spot bordering the terrace to plant sunflowers and radishes. My girls donned their sunhats and gardening gloves, and we all worked together to loosen the dirt, clear away the leaves and push the seeds underground. They will diligently bring water to their treasures every day until the promise of new life that they await becomes a reality, like making a wish on a star until the day it comes true. They even sang a song to the seeds to help them grow.

But I rip up the roots of the mint plant that’s invading my garden–mint, a prized herb in Arabic cultures. I lament the futility: the futility of shaping nature to our guise, the futility of bringing order to a few square meters of garden when people are being killed in a war that I abhor half a world away. My conscience is unappeased. I wake from dreams where crawling soldiers in an orange haze wield machine guns, only to see the same dust-storm footage on TV. I am powerless before a world I don’t recognize, and compensate by letting loose my wrath on nature.

At night, like a good American, I fill in the boxes of my tax return, noting in passing that eighteen percent, or more, of the dividend will go to buy more bombs and tanks. I pause to ponder whether I should mark “conscientious objector” on the envelope in neon highlighter, as did my brother at another point in history. When did they amend the Constitution to say “All men are created equal, except for those of Middle-Eastern origin?” Perhaps at the same time they voted to endow unconstitutional emergency powers to the President. Is rampant paranoia keeping everyone from remembering the inalienable rights of the prisoners in Guantanamo? My perspective as an American expatriate in Europe enables me to see a side of the war that is filtered and sterilized on American soil—subject matter for a media event—and as a result, I feel increasingly isolated, uprooted from my native culture.

I am American. But I cannot support a government that camouflages the economic realities of acquiring, in true colonial form, the world’s second-largest oil reserves, behind a charade of would-be weapons caches, weapons possibly furnished by the US at another point in history. I cannot support a government whose private interests will reap the benefits of a murderous war and the reconstruction of a devastated country where the seeds of hatred are taking deep roots. I cannot support a government that ignores peaceful options and proceeds to destruction without evidence in the face of protest from an entire planet. I cannot support a government that triumphantly convoys care packages in front of television cameras to a riotous population of strong, healthy men while it encircles cities, cutting off their water and supplies for days on end, in a strategy reminiscent of the middle ages. I cannot support a gluttonous culture that usurps approximately three-fifths of the world’s resources for only 5% of its population, without a second thought.

So, instead I teach my children about the miracle of life that comes from Yahweh and God and Allah. I teach them of tolerance and kindness. I teach them to hate war and destruction, to hate circumstances that lead people to do evil things. I teach them compassion for all living things, responsibility for those in need, and courage to change the world around them for the better. This is the dream of hope that I have for their future.