Since when did it become a sin to have a bleeding heart? Should I be ashamed that I’m made of flesh and blood? Every holy woman or man is the more blessed the more the sinner can see that it is bright and viscous blood which surges in the saint’s heart. Yet here in this land of milk and honey, I’ve become afraid even to touch the earth, let alone admit I’m made of it. Do I imagine that the punishing father will come home to rip the honeyed bread from my mouth and splash the milk across the floor? I think I must. I know I deserve no more. Yet, there’s the bread, the milk, the honey . . . every morning, every night. God! I’m scared that someone will notice I’m the sinner, not the saint!
So I keep my head down. Don’t look in the eye of the stranger on the street. Cross over to the other side when I see trouble ahead. Turn the corner before the beggar catches me up. Scurry back into my hole when I hear footsteps behind me at night. It’s chaos out there, the tooth and the claw, rat’s race and grindstone and fear, fear, fear!
Should I happen one day to awaken without fear, all I need do is read the news, turn on TV, listen to the radio or access the Web. Before half an hour passes, I’ll remember a hundred reasons to be afraid. Where’s today’s hurricane? Earthquake? Genocide? Who’s just killed whom . . . and how many? Has the ice cap melted yet, are the polar bears all dead? Is the rainforest gone completely? The frogs and birds entirely disappeared? Have we left anyone out there who isn’t our enemy? Maybe I should get a gun. Never mind that I don’t really know how to use one. I’m sure it’d make me feel braver to brandish my weapon when threatened. But I feel threatened all the time! Yet I never see the face of the adversary.
Maybe that’s because he rides my back. And, there’s no turning fast enough to catch a glimpse. He’s always behind me because he belongs to me, my shadow. I make him; he makes me do things I wish I hadn’t, but we can’t be separated. For I fear to be without my fear. Instead, I dress him up and take him out for a nice dinner. Maybe truite a l’almondine will make us better friends. Tomorrow, we’ll keep it simple and go to the corner pub. There’re some guys I want to introduce him to. I know they’re all haunted by the same demon I am.
Perhaps, just perhaps, we will lift a glass and remember we’re all in this together! Democrat-Republican, Conservative-Liberal, Hutu-Tutsi, Israeli-Palestinian, Shi’a-Sunni, Catholic-Protestant, Hindu-Muslim, East-West, Mars-Venus, Us-Them. Why do epic adversaries always come in pairs? Can’t the human mind encompass more than one thing at a time? Not one of us gets out of this place alive! So, maybe we ought to make the best of it while we’re here. Here’s the bread . . . and there the honey. God doesn’t run away from us. We run from God and we never look back. After all, let’s not forget what happened to Lot’s wife! As if I need a reason not to glance behind me when I know it’s the wrath of God there. Is that why I can’t see my shadow?
When my sister bleeds—even if she’s the nameless Lot’s wife—I bleed too. And she bleeds every month. Isn’t that blood enough? Maybe if I let it slip from my mind that I’m my sister’s keeper, send her off to the red tent with the other women and get back to my man’s work, I can pretend that her blood isn’t mine, isn’t spilled for me and my children.
So, whose blood is this on my hands? Is it the blood of the elephant and rhinoceros, whose tough and pointy parts I must possess to keep my manhood hard? Is it the blood of tiger and ape, of frog and bird, bluefin and coral? How about Eritrea, Darfur, Tibet, Srebenica, Rwanda, Gallipoli, Wounded Knee, Auschwitz . . . ? Where will it end? In Iraq? North Korea? China? A flooded Antarctica? How many must I kill before my bloodlust is slaked? And to what end?
Whether dollar, yuan, rupee, ruble, peso or dinar—every single one is another tree whose life I took! Yet in the morning, in the evening . . . there’s the milk, bread and honey! Couldn’t I share it, just this once? I think my neighbor’s child may be starving. Let that thought flit through your mind, and the shadow shows up immediately to whisper in your ear, “It’s yours! Daddy gave it to you today, but you don’t know for sure that he will again tomorrow. So eat what you can and hide the rest. If your neighbor knows you have it, she’ll kill to have it from you. That’s what you’d do, wouldn’t you, if your baby were starving?” And you know you would, maybe for a lot less reason than that.
You stole the land you live on from the indigene. You pillaged the forest for the house you live in. You rape the earth for the meat in your mouth and the corn in the cupboard. You take and you take and you take, and what’s left in the end? A broken pillar of ash and salt on a bed of silk and gold. Oh, my! What riches you’ve amassed! Too bad you’re not here to enjoy them.
For me, I’m happy my heart still bleeds. I’m not entirely mineral yet. I have a shred of hope left, so I’ll vote for Obama because among politicians he alone urges my hope to live. I don’t know about you, but when I stop hoping, I die. And I’d like to believe that the day may come when I set aside my fear for a moment and invite my neighbor’s hungry family to sit down with me for a meal of bread, honey and milk.
. . .
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2 comments:
Compassion can take many forms and the American culture is perilously oblivious to most of them. This is why I smirk at Americans who seem so astonished that 'we're in the mess we're in' and why I openly condemn Americans who try to convince themselves that the precipitous decline in our influence and power is someone else's fault.
With our pervasively christian bias, we even call expressions of compassion 'good deeds'. The word 'deed' itself implies an -action- ; something that is done precluding even the possibility that refraining from an action can be a good thing.
Far too few Americans can conceive that NOT doing something can be a BETTER thing than doing something...or it's always better than doing simply -anything-. Our heroes are 'men of action' charging from one selfless crusade to the next, and our pariahs are 'welfare mothers'; lazy and parasitic.
I submit that the experience that welfare mothers have with making do with less and less would have provided us with a viable economy as opposed to the one provided to us by the MBA's. I bet they'd have been willing to do it for less self-aggrandizing and rapacious salaries too. Hard work is touted as a virtue in and of itself as if it doesn't matter at all what you are working for ... and AGAINST.
It is unreasonable to think that working hard for one thing is not working hard against something else. That's the downside of the path of action. If you blind yourself to what you're destroying in your efforts to build, then you invite unforeseen consequences.
The 'first world' has a harrowingly narrow window of time (probably less than one generation) to learn to be happy with less and less and that means that it's values must shift. We need to learn to value and applaud as loudly for enterprises that maintain their quality standards, pay just wages, and don't increase a damn thing as we do now for hollow bubble-businesses that pump money at a furious ever-increasing pace from the many to the few and then explode publicly...leaving their messes to the government to clean up.
Action's effectiveness is vastly overrated! I have come to realize that those who observe carefully and patiently and then decide NOT to act or do-without do as much, or even more good, than those who feel driven to react to every minute change in every situation. Every two-bit investment counselor will pay lip-service to the 'fact that the only smart investment strategy is very long-term ....so.... then can you explain to me why the trend in finance information was been toward keeping trading floors open 24-hrs a day and information updated every nanosecond this year if it was only updated every millisecond last year.
What reasonable person can fail to conclude that it's a lie.
If the whole world took a day off and refrained from buying anything for just one day. I believe a very enlightening story would emerge about which economic strata would be hurt the most. Anytime we reach a crisis they give us an economic stimulus check to spend. When the Twin Towers collapsed they told us to shop! I know i could survive one day a week , not driving, not spending, not churning. (I could just use the time to read the instruction manuals of the stuff i bought the rest of the week.) I'm very interested to see whom that would hurt, and who would survive just fine..... makes me wonder who is REALLY benefiting from all that action....and it opens the question of why we're so afraid of what lies down the path of NON-action.
Sometimes compassion is not to rush in with red-light's blazing, with oxygen in tanks, and adrenaline in a syringe.
Sometimes the compassion is in doing nothing while a dying thing dies.
(shudder) seems almost unamerican.... don't it?
Thanks, Doc. That's exactly the sort of thought I was hoping to elicit. Of course, I knew I could count on you. --Xris
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