Thursday, December 30, 2004

Making Little Sense of Everything

The day rides along in meaninglessness and nothingness because what can one really do when thinking of so many dead bodies and people in agony? I imagine a chaotic Bosch surreality in the very, very real horrors of these people’s lives. And it is thinking of them that feels so confusing. What does thinking of them do? This is not some kind of collective “we can heal their wounds with prayer” scenario. I am just asking what can we do besides give our money and watch as the aid workers and government workers do their jobs?

We can imagine troops being pulled out of Iraq and deployed to distribute supplies in SE Asia. We can imagine all other bombings in the Middle East are on hold and that the crisis in Darfur is frozen for the moment. We can imagine that this didn’t actually happen.

If you close your eyes, it can be true.

Open them again, and see how the suffering of a mother has lost her son in a car accident is no more and no less than those who have lost their children or parents or more in a tsunami. What seems worse, what really may be worse, is the terror experienced by people in a massive tragedy. As on Sept. 11, when we all gripped our chests in fear and anxiety, as well as in sadness, for those of us who lost people we cared about, or for those of us who felt the pain for other people.

What can we do, when the numbers of people homeless and suffering are in the millions? We are far away, we keep our eyes half closed, to keep out the searing images of death. We open them just enough to remind ourselves it is happening without overwhelming our senses, maybe.

Is it enough to just look? Does looking actually help? Does looking feel wrong, as it did to many of us who watched others look, noses pressed up close to our tragedy in New York? Or is this what we need to do?

This is hardly an event that can be possessed or even comprehended. It just seems like a time to decide what humanity can and cannot bear and just how we as a whole, and most likely even individually, choose to deal with it.

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