America…Where Do We Begin?
I can’t sleep. Again. Tonight I’m thinking about how, in the city where I live, the police shot and killed a 34-year-old unarmed woman today, with her 1-year-old in the back seat of her 2-door sedan. I’m thinking about how I’ve driven those very streets, gotten stuck in tourist traffic on those avenues, turned around with frustration and exasperation at those barricades. I don’t know what will be revealed in the days ahead about this particular person and what she was hypothetically going through, but we’ll never know for certain, will we? She was killed, in her car, with her daughter in the back seat.
As usual, I appreciate Petula Dvorak’s quick and thoughtful column on the craziness in this world. I noted one commenter in particular on this column who observed that “If she [the driver] had been a moose, or a bear, they would have used a tranquilizer dart.” Yep. We are so threatened by one another, these days, that we take each other out first, ask questions later, questions that are mostly unanswerable when the subject in question has been taken out of the equation, out of any possible conversation.
What is going on in our country? Our elected leaders can’t pass a budget, can’t resolve a conflict that is negatively impacting thousands, if not millions, of lives. But when the police “successfully” manage to work together to kill a woman in a car without first stopping her and assessing her in any way, this is celebrated. “Police said the incident showed the success of the huge security apparatus that Washington has built since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. ‘The security perimeters worked’ at both the White House and the Capitol, Lanier said. ‘They did exactly what they were supposed to do.'”
Guantanamo Bay prisoners
They did? This is exactly what was supposed to happen? America, I say, (recognizing that by that moniker I mean the United States of America, in a Ginsberg way, not all of North America, not Central or South America. I can speak only for this country, the one in which I was born, my parents were born, and my grandparents were born, including my 90-year-old grandmother who laments that this is a country she “used to be proud of.”) America: is this who we are, now? A country which refuses to pay our bills because we don’t want to have to provide health care to our citizens, a country which shoots people first and asks why they went “off-the-rails” later—when it’s long past too late to do anything about it, a country which imprisons people indefinitely who have never been convicted of anything (Guantanamo Bay, remember? Anyone?)?
How did we get to this point? Was it always this way, or has there truly been a shift in our country? Do people like me (thirtysomething, middle-class, white, overly-educated, engaged-citizen but busy-with-my-own-life) feel a sense of ownership of “our” country anymore, or do we mostly tune it out? If we did want to do something about the violence in our country today, where would we begin? If we wanted to create some space for healing, where do we begin? Where do we begin?
I have no idea what the police officer who shot the person who may indeed have been Miriam Carey is feeling tonight. But I wonder if he or she isn’t feeling some remorse. Was it really necessary to shoot-to-kill? Maybe that’s where we could all start: some remorse. Some wondering if there isn’t a better way. A better way than scoffing or sarcasm or throwing up our hands in disgust (yes, I too watched this week’s popular Jon Stewart clip critiquing the GOP Shutdown, and I laughed. But afterwards, honestly, I felt a little…bored. I mean, hasn’t Stewart been doing various versions of this same routine for years now? How long can we keep scoffing at each other and have it be entertaining?).
There have got to be some other ways. I don’t yet know what they are. But as I try again to get some sleep, I’m going to conjure up Jill Bolte Taylor’s hands lifted up into the air in the TED talk that I watched tonight while doing the dishes. I was compelled by the feeling in her voice to set down the dishes midway, turn off the water, and come over to my computer and watch her—speaking, feeling, expressing, hoping…that her experience, her vision might impact the world. Her experience was an experience of our genuine interconnectedness. Her experience affirms for me what keeps me awake tonight: it does impact me, and it should impact me, that there are people being held as prisoners by my country without being tried, and that other citizens of my country are force-feeding them because they are on a hunger strike to demand their rights. It does impact me that a woman my age-ish, with a daughter the age of my daughter, perhaps did not receive the attention or care that she should have and, thus, lost control of herself in the nation’s capitol and was shot to death in her car.
Jill Bolte Taylor: “We have the power to choose, moment-by-moment, who and how we want to be in the world. …I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”
Let peace begin with me. Let lament begin with me. Let a refusal to rush-to-blame begin with me. Let the practice of non-reactivity begin with me. Let new ways of being, of engaging, of listening, of questioning, of reacting, of feeling, of persisting, begin with all of us. Let us reach out and ask one another what we need in our lives, if we need help, how we can help. Let us assume not that everyone we know is well, but that everyone we know is struggling, struggling deeply, with something. “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.” Whoever said this, whenever it was said, it echoes through the ages with truth. Perhaps this truth is one place we can start when we wake up tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, to a new day.
The Endless Seconds of Good
letters of schoolchildren
I was feeling a little shaky earlier this week, and it took me a few days to sort it out. I could point to this or that as the reason, but really I know a big part of it is that on Monday morning, there was another shooting. This time the shooting was in a building near a fountain and park where my family and I have gone to play and hang out, and a few blocks from a library where we just were last week for an excellent-and-fun Storytime. We were planning to go again to that same library for that same excellent-and-fun Storytime on Tuesday morning, but it seemed like the best thing to stay home, out of the fray and mayhem of the recovering area, and so we did. And just that would be enough to make me a little shaky—that we didn’t go to a public library storytime because of a shooting.
Then you add to it the photographs and stories of the victims and their families in the newspaper this week, and the choked-up voice of the shooter’s mother on the radio on Wednesday, and it’s all just a little bit too…real. And then you add to that the sense of hopelessness that is palpable right now amongst people trying to pass what I consider totally reasonable gun laws–um, mandatory background checks on people who want to purchase guns? Banning assault weapons? These things seem totally reasonable to me! I feel like our elected representatives are being held hostage by the NRA. So that makes me feel shaky, too.
In Monday’s paper, the one that was printed and delivered well before Aaron Alexis entered Building 197, there was a front page article telling the stories of some of the victims struggling to recover from the April 15th Boston bombing. Halfway into the article, another survivor of the bombing is introduced—Jarrod Clowery. The article talks about how “Clowery’s early days as an inpatient were the darkest; besides his physical injuries, he was deeply depressed and heavily medicated. Then letters began arriving from all over the world, many of them from schoolchildren. ‘They saved my ass,’ he says. ‘I could’ve gone down a dark path.’ His perspective began to change. ….’I got to see in the hospital what we’re capable of in terms of love and compassion,’ he says…. ‘The bomb is one second of pure evil, despicable, the worst. But it’s followed by endless seconds of the good people can do.’”
I know that what I need—what my heart needs, my spirit needs, and my family needs—are more stories like this one. I do not need to absorb more details about what precisely went on, moment-by-moment, in Building 197 on Monday morning. Instead, I need to immerse myself in all the endless seconds of good that followed, that are still unfolding, that were and are already happening, all the time, the little and large kindnesses that create a mostly-civil, mostly-functional society. I need to just take a breath and sit still for awhile and recognize that, without ignoring how much pain there is in the world, in many places, right now, there is also great joy, love, beauty, grace, peace, and gladness. There is goodness, right here, in this apartment that I am tidying up, in the child and parent that are sleeping peacefully in the other room, in the beauty of the fall day that will unfold tomorrow and that has the possibility, still, of being transformative, in a good way, for all of us. There are countless, endless seconds of good that vastly outnumber the awful seconds of tragedy. Yes: we have so much work to do to make this world a more peaceful place. But that work must spring from love of this world, not fear; calm and grounded determination, not panic.
I want to live in the endless seconds of good as much and as often as I can. It is a constant mental adjustment for me, a continual tuning and re-tuning of the instrument that is my brain. If I remind myself to, I gently smile at people, I trust that the person driving behind me is alert and paying attention, I offer a kind word and a breath of patience to those who are helping me. We are all human beings with families and stressors and challenges. May we believe and live in “the endless seconds of good” so that we may, ourselves, contribute to the goodness in our world and reduce, in whatever ways we can, the oceans of pain.
A Better Choice
It was a few days after the 9/11 tragedy. We had done our best to shelter our not-quite-three-year-old daughter from the constant onslaught of images on the news, but there was no way to censor things entirely, particularly our conversations as the tragedy unfolded. How could this happen? Who would do such a thing? How were we to go on?
So it wasn’t too surprising when, as we got to the end of bath time that evening, she said: “Tell me about the splat in the sky.” Explaining horror to a very small child is not the easiest thing in the world, but I did my best. I explained that there were some people who lived far away who got very, very angry at our country. And because they were so angry they decided that they wanted to hurt as many people as they could, and so they flew some airplanes into buildings. And so many, many people were hurt, and we were very sad. She thought for a moment, squared her shoulders, and looked at me from there in the tub. “They should have made a better choice.”
They should have made a better choice. It’s OK to get mad, but it’s not OK to hurt people. Use your words. Look for a solution. Take a breath. Take another breath. So many of life’s tragedies could be avoided if we would all just adhere to the wisdom that we teach our toddlers.
The men who downed the planes should have made a better choice. Also the Bush administration should have made a better choice than to go to war with Iraq. And now, now there is Syria. And surely Assad (and/or his generals) should have made a better choice than to use chemical weapons. But could it be that we are, in fact, on the verge of making a better choice ourselves? Could it be that the governments of the world will manage to walk the fine line between allowing the unacceptable and committing the indefensible?
Probably it is too soon to get attached to hope. But there it is. In this particular moment, Wednesday, 9/11/2013, it seems like President Obama, Congress and various heads of state have acknowledged that there might be a better choice. That there could be solutions that don’t involve blowing things up. That it’s OK to be mad, but that doesn’t mean we need to hurt people. That we could pause, and take a breath, and work toward a solution that is better than what happens when you rely on hurting people to tell the world how you feel.
What will happen remains to be seen, but today I am praying for a better choice.
Acts of God
People are dead, including children. Whole neighborhoods are utterly destroyed, brought down to foundations and rubble. People are injured, traumatized, bereft. And there is no one to blame. No bomber, no shooter, no mad man or terrorist. Simply an “act of God.”
How I hate that phrase, act of God. As if God would come down from the clouds to smite a town out of, what, spite? Vengeance? God does not cause weather events, not out of a need to punish infidels and homosexuals, and not because he needed to call his children home to be with him. You will not find God in the great wind, any more than Elijah did.
No, you will find God in the people who keep calling to find out if their friends and neighbors are OK, in the parents who struggle to assure their children that they are safe, in those who sit at the side of those who mourn, in the mourners themselves. God is in the search and rescue dogs who are tirelessly moving house by house, searching for the scent of the missing, and in their tired handlers who volunteered and trained for this expert, grueling work. God is in the hospital staff tending the wounded and in the family members who wait and wait, hoping their loved one will be OK. God is in the first responders who are still hoping to find children alive and for those who have to carry still figures from the wreckage. God is in the people around the world sending their prayers and their love out to people they will never meet and the people who send their money to the Red Cross or animal rescue groups because it’s the only way they can think of to help.
And yes, God is in the people who dare to point out that while any given weather event is just weather, however tragic, a pattern of more and more extreme weather—the droughts, heat, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, one after the other—that pattern is not an act of God. That pattern is predicted by scientists who study climate change. Which is not an act of God. It is the consequence of a string of human choices. God is not in the droughts and the floods and the tornadoes. God is in the scientists who keep telling the truth when it seems no one is paying attention. God is in the all the people who are trying to limit their use of fossil fuels, in the companies and schools and churches who have invested in solar panels, in the environmental groups calling for meaningful legislation.
God is not in the wind. God is in all the people who see the suffering that is, and the suffering to come, and who choose compassion and justice and the hope of a better world.
