[Peace-political] Barbara Kingsolver's wisdom

[Sharon Irish]

>And the tears just flow on and on.... Sharon
>
>
> >                        A Pure, High Note of Anguish
> >                           by Barbara Kingsolver
> >
> >Tucson -- I want to do something to help right now. But I can't give blood
> >(my hematocrit always runs too low), and I'm too far way to give anybody
> >shelter or a drink of water. I can only give words. My verbal hemoglobin
> >never seems to wane, so words are what I'll offer up in this time that
> >asks of us the best citizenship we've ever mustered. I don't mean to say I
> >have a cure. Answers to the main questions of the day--Where was that
> >fourth plane headed? How did they get knives through security?--I don't
> >know any of that. I have some answers, but only to the questions nobody is
> >asking right now but my 5-year old. Why did all those people die when they
> >didn't do anything wrong? Will it happen to me? Is this the worst thing
> >that's ever happened? Who were those children cheering that they showed
> >for just a minute, and why were they glad? Please, will this ever, ever
> >happen to me? There are so many answers, and none: It is desperately
> >painful to see people die without having done anything to deserve it, and
> >yet this is how lives end nearly always. We get old or we don't, we get
> >cancer, we starve, we are battered, we get on a plane thinking we're going
> >home but never make it.
> >
> >There are blessings and wonders and horrific bad luck and no guarantees.
> >We like to pretend life is different from that, more like a game we can
> >actually win with the right strategy, but it isn't. And, yes, it's the
> >worst thing that's happened, but only this week. Two years ago, an
> >earthquake in Turkey killed 17,000 people in a day, babies and mothers and
> >businessmen, and not one of them did a thing to cause it. The November
> >before that, a hurricane hit Honduras and Nicaragua and killed even more,
> >buried whole villages and erased family lines and even now, people wake up
> >there empty-handed. Which end of the world shall we talk about? Sixty
> >years ago, Japanese airplanes bombed Navy boys who were sleeping on ships
> >in gentle Pacific waters. Three and a half years later, American planes
> >bombed a plaza in Japan where men and women were going to work, where
> >schoolchildren were playing, and more humans died at once than anyone
> >thought possible. Seventy thousand in a minute. Imagine. Then twice that
> >many more, slowly, from the inside.
> >
> >There are no worst days, it seems. Ten years ago, early on a January
> >morning, bombs rained down from the sky and caused great buildings in the
> >city of Baghdad to fall down--hotels, hospitals, palaces, buildings with
> >mothers and soldiers inside--and here in the place I want to love best, I
> >had to watch people cheering about it. In Baghdad, survivors shook their
> >fists at the sky and said the word "evil." When many lives are lost all at
> >once, people gather together and say words like "heinous" and "honor" and
> >"revenge," presuming to make this awful moment stand apart somehow from
> >the ways people die a little each day from sickness or hunger. They raise
> >up their compatriots' lives to a sacred place--we do this, all of us who
> >are human -- thinking our own citizens to be more worthy of grief and less
> >willingly risked than lives on other soil. But broken hearts are not
> >mended in this ceremony, because, really, every life that ends is utterly
> >its own event--and also in some way it's the same as all others, a light
> >going out that ached to burn longer. Even if you never had the chance to
> >love the light that's gone, you miss it. You should. You bear this world
> >and everything that's wrong with it by holding life still precious, each
> >time, and starting over.
> >
> >And those children dancing in the street? That is the hardest question. We
> >would rather discuss trails of evidence and whom to stamp out, even the
> >size and shape of the cage we might put ourselves in to stay safe, than to
> >mention the fact that our nation is not universally beloved; we are also
> >despised. And not just by "The Terrorist," that lone, deranged non-man in
> >a bad photograph whose opinion we can clearly dismiss, but by ordinary
> >people in many lands. Even by little boys --whole towns full of them it
> >looked like--jumping for joy in school shoes and pilled woolen sweaters.
> >
> >There are a hundred ways to be a good citizen, and one of them is to look
> >finally at the things we don't want to see. In a week of terrifying
> >events, here is one awful, true thing that hasn't much been mentioned:
> >Some people believe our country needed to learn how to hurt in this new
> >way. This is such a large lesson, so hatefully, wrongfully taught, but
> >many people before us have learned honest truths from wrongful deaths. It
> >still may be within our capacity of mercy to say this much is true: We
> >didn't really understand how it felt when citizens were buried alive in
> >Turkey or Nicaragua or Hiroshima. Or that night in Baghdad. And we haven't
> >cared enough for the particular brothers and mothers taken down a limb or
> >a life at a time, for such a span of years that those little, briefly
> >jubilant boys have grown up with twisted hearts. How could we keep raining
> >down bombs and selling weapons, if we had? How can our president still use
> >that word "attack" so casually, like a move in a checker game, now that we
> >have awakened to see that word in our own newspapers, used like this:
> >Attack on America.
> >
> >Surely, the whole world grieves for us right now. And surely it also hopes
> >we might have learned, from the taste of our own blood, that every war is
> >both won and lost, and that loss is a pure, high note of anguish like a
> >mother singing to any empty bed. The mortal citizens of a planet are
> >praying right now that we will bear in mind, better than ever before, that
> >no kind of bomb ever built will extinguish hatred.
> >
> >"Will this happen to me?" is the wrong question, I'm sad to say. It always
> >was.
> >