Convictions

I have been thinking lately about the plurality of meanings for the word conviction.

One reading of the word leads to images of quiet strength and courage. Rosa Parks, for example. I was pleased to learn—finally—that her act was not a snap decision of human weariness winning out over senseless laws but the fruit of the long growth of the nonviolent Civil Rights Movement, of which she was a vital part. Wonderful that she sat, better still that such a force and solid movement of humane ethics and organization stood behind her actions.

I find it suspicious that I was taught, essentially, that she just “got tired” and sat down. Technically, that is a true statement, but the full story of what she was tired of wasn’t made explicit. That my education divorced her actions from premeditation, from her convictions, from the hard truth and long hours of preparation and planning and logistics and harnessed passion of a group of people who were compelled to break laws to obtain a better, more just existence. We assume, I think, that the legality of a law supplants the morality of the law. It takes a deep knowledge of one’s own truths, and an impressive amount of courage, to tell the difference. To me, this is the definition of conviction that pulls my best intentions back into my bones and allows for forward movement.

But, blink and read the word again and the images lead to courts and prisons and Australia and Abel Magwitch. For those who aren’t familiar, Abel Magwitch is a strangely glorious character from Dickens’s “Great Expectations.” He is a convict (embezzlement, debts, attempted murder, chained to a ship, etc.) whom Pip helps, out of fear of this wild, shackled man who attacks him in a graveyard. When Pip grows up, Magwitch returns and Dickensian high jinks ensue. I laughed out loud through “Great Expectations” so don’t want to spoil another word of it, but Magwitch’s morality is no simple matter.

I freely agree that there are horrible people who are guilty of terrible things. I’m not trying to dismiss all criminals and convicts as misunderstood by exploring the word conviction. But I do begin to wonder what is the relationship of truth and action and law and crime and punishment that meet in this word.

Last week, I mentioned the duality of conviction to a friend. It was in the context of an act of protest regarding climate change that he had participated in. (Specifically, he and another man used a small boat to block a large boat full of coal from docking and unloading at a coal burning power plant. Details about this are at: www.coalisstupid.org). Their action falls into the slightly murky territory of civil disobedience, although it remains unclear what—if any—laws were broken by their actions and it all sounds quite civil and obedient, really. I said, “I’m impressed with your conviction,” and meant the personal truth and active reckoning that finds a gap between legality and morality.

We talked over the two meanings, and then he mentioned a third, that conviction also means “to sit quietly and thoughtfully with oneself and to convict oneself of living in a condition of immorality and participating in a great wrong—or even evil.  As if there were some higher moral and internal judge, and the truth of how to be a good person in the world were a code of law, and you must try yourself and you find your self a part of an immoral system.”

To follow the chain here—and chains seems illustratively appropriate for this conversation—convictions arise from an internal recognition, which lead to external actions, which can lead to reactions from the wider world and its legal articulations of a society’s moral code and ethics. Once you have found yourself part of the system, you must work to change either yourself or the system or both. Thoreau says: “things do not change, we do change.” But, we can also change things. And should.

With my sunny and Romantic ideas that the laws of this country were based on the inner convictions of a group of very flawed, but very well-intentioned and thoughtful and intelligent men, I am upset at the gaps where our society’s laws—the legal articulation of our priorities and morals and ethics—seem to have grown so distant from our humanity, from the places where convictions originally arise.

I believe in good governance, in just laws that protect, educate, and assist people in their lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness. I further think that everyone has a right to be governed thusly, and for all voices to be heard in a representative governing body. As near as I can tell, this is what we are supposed to be here in the United States.

But we’re not. Somehow, business and corporate interests crept into the gap between our personal convictions and our laws. In the last month alone gun-lobby money has stopped popularly demanded legislation surrounding gun control; our Supreme Court sided with Monsanto regarding the Indiana farmer who purchased second-run seeds that contained Monsanto’s patented GMO seeds from a source other than Monsanto and is deemed to have stolen Monsanto’s property; and the Keystone Pipeline continues to be considered by our representative government to be a good and viable project, despite the obvious detriment to many lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness of citizens that the pipeline would entail. This morning I heard that Gina McCarthy, who is in the confirmation process to become the next director of the EPA, told senators that the EPA has no plans to limit emissions from existing power plants.

Without becoming a screaming harpy, a one-trick pony, regarding the constant issue of profit over people, I cannot say enough how horrible all these things seem. I find it criminal that our government guards corporate concerns above the lives and well being of its citizens. Life—we’re complicit in a system that values guns over innocent life. Liberty—we’re letting corporations dictate the seeds a farmer can grow, by extension, the food we eat. Pursuit of happiness—we are sitting by as our silence destroys the planet with more fossil fuels and power plant emissions. Many of my own sources of greatest joy and happiness are threatened with certain extinction by fire or flood. So are yours. All of these actions are legal, perhaps, but they are not moral and they are not kind. We must bring those words into greater alignment.

I have sat, and I have listened to my heart. I have read a great deal, and I have traveled widely and kept my eyes and mind open. I know in my bones some of what I am complicit in, responsible for, and I do not like to be part of such horror. I want to change. I want to be and do better by this planet and its people. I may know just enough to get myself into trouble, but what is at stake is worth making a little trouble over. I have convicted myself to live within the bounds of an ethos and morality that respects, champions people and our battered, salvaged, beloved planet over corporate profits. I get the sense that it’s a life sentence, and that there may be some hard labor involved in living striving to remake the world along these lines, but this is my conviction. 

Making Peace

It is a beautiful, hot May afternoon in Cambridge. The air is ripe with the smells of new leaves and drying dirt and flowers, almost in bloom. I like the lilacs best, but that might be a product of my granite roots. If you've read the last few posts and perhaps think that I am a font of spewing rage, wanting to clash violent pedagogies against sheer fury in a riot of destruction, I am not. I actively seek and enjoy happiness, I find the world more beautiful than terrible. The fury doesn’t negate or overshadow the beauty. The world is wonderful, but it is not perfect. Like Barbara Cooney’s Miss Rumphius, the point is to do something to make the world more beautiful. And that can include admitting and working against injustice, which is bound to make a bunny a bit angry at time. The smell of the lilacs…this is both balm against the fury and something to fight for.

And so, making peace. No, I don’t know exactly how to do this. But I am trying, as many people are in a gorgeous variety of ways.

I went to The Massachusetts Poetry Festival this weekend. Driving past the ocean in Lynn, NPR informed me that the body of deceased suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings has been removed to a funeral home in Worcester. This funeral home, Graham Putnam and Mahoney Funeral Parlors, specializes in providing funeral services to the unpopular dead. The owner, Peter Stefan, said on air that he believes everyone deserves a respectful burial, and so his funeral parlor takes in poor people, murderers, criminals, and other dead bodies of unsavory origin. 

I love this. To me, Peter Stefan is as much a hero as the citizens who ran towards the explosions, hearts and hands open to help the broken.

The night before the Boston lockdown—in those stranger hours after the suspects photos had been released and the desperate rampage from Cambridge to Watertown began—I attended a vigil in Somerville. Along with the runners who spoke, a man stood at the podium and yelled into the darkness and the assembled crowds that “this terrorist act was committed by people of hate, we are people of love. They should know that we will never change and be like them, these people of hate.” There was vitriol and hurt in his voice when he spoke the word “hate.” And there was applause from the vigil.

I did not clap. If we are people of love, truly, then how can we even speak of these “people of hate” with such hatred? And, if we are to not change, how can we learn? And if we do not learn, how can we stop filling the world with hate, with terror?

I thought again of this man, saying that we are people of love, as the radio tells me of people protesting outside the funeral home. What possible benefit can come, to anyone, of protesting the dead? All it does is fill a crowd with useless, directionless ire. Someone said to me, “ that is what he wanted, he wanted the hate.”

I do not know what this dead man and his brother wanted with their violence. But, if we could know, and know that they wanted hate, why are we giving into the hatred? Why are we, in response to hurt and fear and confusion, giving the terrorists that victory? We are better than this, America, Boston. If I am going to claim you as my city, keep you as my country with any pride, we must be.

I’ve been turning over some of Mariane Pearl’s words. For those who don’t remember, her husband was the journalist Danny Pearl who was kidnapped and decapitated by terrorists, on film, while Mariane was pregnant with their son. In her book, A Mighty Heart, she writes: “The task of changing a hate-filled world belongs to each one of us.” I read somewhere that every time she is happy, or their son smiles, she feels a hint of victory, that the terrorists have failed and not corrupted her ability to be happy, to love. If she can refuse to be corrupted by hate, who cannot try?

Currently, the dead body that was Tamerlan Tsarnaev cannot find a resting place. No cemetery in Massachusetts is yet able to take it in, to bury this body in the dirt where it can do no further harm. There are a few cemeteries that are willing, but the towns and cities of these cemeteries are unwilling. 

This is egregious, just as egregious as attempting to kill innocent civilians at a marathon, really. 

Denying anyone’s right to a good life and a peaceful death is a crime. If we do no different, we are no different.

It is not that I do not understand hurt, do not understand anger and shock and sadness and loss. I’m human, after all, and loss of life and limb and the punctured innocence of all involved in the Boston Marathon bombings are horrific.

But we cannot answer hate with hate. This is eye for eye, tooth for tooth. I need my eyes to see the lilacs, my teeth to tear into strawberries.

I was thinking all these swirling thoughts of hate and overreaction and how we’re forgetting our best selves, forgetting ourselves as people of love, how to make the dark parts of the world sweeter, how to heal…all of this as I attended the Poetry Festival in Salem.

At the keynote reading, the incredibly wise and dynamic poet Jill McDonough read her poem, “Accident, Mass. Ave.” You should read it here.

In the wake of this, our accident, we are just scared. The inability to let a body rest, this comes from fear of what was, not any recognition for what is. Its hard to admit to being afraid, but that seems a truer word. I do not know how to banish all hatred and fear, but it seems like making peace and meeting hate with love, truly, might be a better start than protesting the dead. One way will not change the past; the other may change the future.

Violent Pedagogy

“You with your violent pedagogy, and me with my broken heart!” A dear friend of mine has spent years howling these words at me in a variety of situations, for a variety of purposes. He says, now, that the words first came from an intense desire to have people—myself very much included—embrace the reality that there is more than one means to any end, that adhering to a rigid dogma ignores the beating, breaking hearts. Ignore those, and we will get approximately nowhere we wish or need to go.

I think about this a great deal, especially lately. I moved to the Boston area because I thought that what I wanted to/should want to do was put my graduate degree to work at any of the non-profit organizations ringing the city. It’s been nearly three years since I left Montana with a Master’s Degree, tucked in among my dog and books and skis, and returned to New England. I’ve spent too much of that time thinking that my goal ought to be putting that MS in Environmental Studies to good use for the betterment of the planet through traditional structures. As if the words on a diploma were the magic key that would let me into doing the great work of the world. I’ve complained countless times that I just want a job that will use my brain. And so, still, I clung dogmatically to what was linear and logical and expected. And willfully ignored that such adherence, such expectations, would never heal my broken heart at the state of the world.

My death grip on that violent pedagogy is loosening, finally, this spring. Because, the closer I cleave to the linear and expected and traditional path, the farther away from my heart I feel. I have a file on my computer labeled “Cover Letters.” It contains 156 different cover letters, numerous versions of my resume, and other detritus of my years of running West, looking for a sunrise, job wise. This number doesn’t include the multitude of online application forms I have also submitted. By and large, I hear nothing from most of these schools and organizations and programs where I have applied for communications or outreach or research assistant or donor relations or any of these jobs titles that stick in my throat, that feel as constricting as the pantyhose I’d likely have to wear. But, according to the pedagogy of our country and education system and our metrics for success, these are what I should do. And so I continue, having been told that this is how one makes it, that this is the path towards success, towards happiness.

Doing what I feel obligated to, what I feel that I should, what is supposed get me an A+ in  American Dreams…I begin to suspect that this will not make me happy. And, while my memory of Philosophy 101 led me to believe that I would never agree with Emmanuel Kant in any regard, his line that “to secure one’s own happiness is a duty,” has been ringing in my head for the past few months as I stumble though, striving to figure life out.

Currently, I waitress three days a week. If I think about this too much one way, it hurts terribly. I have something better to offer the world than a  (barely) passable cappuccino, and it burns that I cannot find the right context to give what I so desperately long to share. But, clearly, the traditional structures of American life are not that into what I have to give. The job market for creative writers with a burning passion to guide people towards loving the world enough to save it, is, surprisingly, nonexistent. Funny, because I can’t think of anything we need more.

And here is the deeper rub of the violent pedagogy of the American Dream, educational structures, and job market: student loans. In a nutshell, too many others and I are in heart-stopping debt because of our educations. The rules of the game, as I understood them at the outset of college, of graduate school, were: swallow the bitter pill and take the loans, get a good education, and that education will land you to a job where you can pay back those loans. (Ideally, in time to buy a nice car, a house, a lot of short-lived, disposable crap, marry the flawless love of your life, and start popping out more little Americans, who in turn with require more expensive educations and who will consume an unholy amount of MORE ephemeral gadgetry.)

Partially because I was unable to find a job with my undergraduate education that would enable me pay back my undergraduate debt, I attended graduate school, where I re-entered the same game. They say insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, and I admit that I should have looked more closely into the financial realities of a MS in Environmental Studies on the American job market. But, again, with over 156 job applications over the course of the 153 weeks since my graduation, and thirteen part-time, temporary, and seasonal jobs since obtaining my degree, I begin to suspect that failure does not lie solely with me. Or perhaps it does, but it is not a failure of effort or hard work. This is another piece of the American mythology I take issue with, that breaks my heart—that education, hard work, and committed determination will result in success. I have been triying, as best I can by the lights of my education, to adhere to that ideology, to play that game, as I understood the rules. But it isn’t working, on any level.

And, part of this struggle may come from the heart and subject of my particular education. In college I studied Environmental Studies and Creative Writing and Philosophy and Outdoor Studies and African Studies. I’ve never been on track to be an international financial analyst or, really, anything other than the sort of dreamily indignant writer that I am, hoping and striving to make the world a better place. I believe with every fiber of my being that this is why we are here. And I cannot fathom how this goal can fall outside any pedagogy, any path towards or metric of a successful life. Regardless, the definition and direction of my education was never mentioned as part of the student loan bargain—nor should it be. Should education be fueled only by what will net the student the highest salary? Should poorer students not be enabled to pursue their passions? Are we, as a country, to lose or limit the love of learning? That is a truly violent and vile pedagogy, and one that feels more cruel and more real every time I have emails from my student loan companies sitting alongside job rejections in my inbox.

As this system is broken, I see fewer and fewer reasons to cling to it. There is a time to leave a sinking ship, and for me, as much as I am able (while avoiding default on my loans, because I cannot abide the sick feeling of indebtedness), I believe that this time is now. This is what makes my waitressing job bearable, this feeling that I can drop out of the system, exit the argument, and refuse to play by the violent rules of a broken system. My employment need not be, should not be, the source and food of my passions. (As another friend says, “you shouldn’t make a whore out of your true love.”) The violent pedagogy does not understand passion, and if it cannot, then at my core, I have nothing in common with it. Outside the boundaries of expectation, the ruts and routines that catch us, drag us down in a keening of frustration and unkind sense of failure, outside these structures this is where the broken hearts will come together, this is where the strength of humanity is. And here, with our hearts cracked and bleeding with joy and labor and love, is where we can start down our intersecting, uniquely passionate and effective paths towards something better than what we have known. I suspect that it will be more wonderful than we can yet imagine.

God knows there is enough violence in this world without visiting it upon ourselves.

Earth Day, and The Angriest Person I've Ever Met

Today is Earth Day. I spent the better parts of yesterday trying to crawl out of my urban life. It’s been a strange, sad, hard week in Boston. Anyone with a radio, internet access, television, or chatty strangers probably knows this. The other night all I wanted to do was run to a wild place and be still amongst the trees and the stars and the unquiet tranquility of a New England forest in spring. My nearest woods, now that I’m urban, close at dusk. So I contented myself with finding Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” through the Poetry Foundation’s excellent website. I read the words over and over on my blinky computer screen as night came on in the city.

The poem has been working its way deeper into my mind ever since. The words are almost filling an ache for being at once at peace and wild…almost.

But yesterday, instead of going quickly to the woods at dawn and lying still on the ground until the world seemed fine and graceful again, I read Nicholas Lemann’s essay “When the Earth Moved” from the April 15^th The New Yorker. Lemann details multiple failures of the Environmental movement from the first 1970 Earth Day Teach-In to the current, sorry, state of green affairs. Earth Day started as a grassroots day of learning. There were no corporate partners, no oil industry players participated in the day as part of a sneaky, sideline campaign designed to “green” their dirty image. And yet, from what I’ve read (and I do have a graduate degree in this stuff) and what I’ve heard from my elders who were there, by God, Earth Day was—briefly—effective in altering behavior and public policy. People got together, and shit. got. done. EPA! Clean Air Act! Clean Water Act! Super Fund! Endangered Species Act! Well done, and thank you.

Something terrible seems to have happened since then. I’ve personally attended a staff retreat of a large environmental non-profit—the Appalachian Mountain Club—and listened to a PowerPoint presentation about how to use Twitter as a tool for conservation. Tweeting had been used as a lobbying tool on air quality legislation, and despite all the Tweets, the measure failed (i.e. air stayed polluted), and we were discussing this as a successful campaign because of the number of Tweets. I readily agree with the adage that any tool is a weapon if you hold it right, but that meeting felt a thousand miles from where the Environmental movement should be. 

The failure may be that we’ve tried to join the increasing corporatization of this country. In that light, it doesn’t surprise me that environmentalism is lagging, that our successes have been so relatively few and we’re willing to accept such anemic compromises as success in the first place.

Because, at heart, this has never been a corporate/government/business entity. These are matters, deeply, of the heart. And this is where our efforts and resistance must come from if we are to be successful, if we are to save, protect, preserve, salvage anything good on this little spinning orb of sea, earth, blood and fire.

One thing that we are missing is rage. The things I love, the ways I want the world and its people to be towards each other, all of this is under constant threat. I’m furious about this, that things I love are not safe. The peace of wild things can only quell this fury for small spells, thankfully.

People say that rage is bad, that anger will not help the situation. I’m not advocating for violent actions to be taken out of this rage—I’m unlikely to kick oil executives or dirty-monied members of Congress in their teeth (teeth don’t heal)—but I do think that the motivation of rage, the fury that what I love is being robbed of me by a corrupt system while I stand idly by, this feels like a clean, good burning fuel. The struggle is to make the anger useful and non-violent, just as it is to make the love active.

A motivating rage extends farther than blogging alone at midnight about the state of the world or clicking “Like” or tweeting “#Happy Earth Day!” or emailing elected officials to stop a criminally stupid pipeline. While I’ll keep doing all of those things (minus the tweeting), they increasingly feel like not enough to quiet the raging beast, to bring peace to the wild things.

And here is where I think of the angriest person I’ve ever met. She was five years old, and had the communication abilities of a feral dog. She was born deaf, and when I met her, she was just beginning to learn sign language. Her parents had not been able to admit she was deaf, and so, for five years she had no way to effectively communicate with the world. All that a person can see and experience and question and long to express in those first five years of life was bottled up in this child. She broke my heart, and lately, a decade or more after I knew her, I’ve been thinking about her more, as my own rage grows.

The rage, the frustration, the defeat, despair, apathy, back-broken hope, and all the other current road blocks to a vibrant, effective Environmental movement stem, in part, from something similar. The current structures of the world cannot hear what we’re saying, or perhaps they willfully do not listen to the truth. Either way, it amounts to the same. So we need to change how we communicate, within ourselves as much as with the powers that be.

Here is my thought. It comes, in part, from counseling a co-worker at my café who is going through a very bad break-up. We, the green folks, almost had kind of a good thing with U.S. Policy makers, about 40 years ago. Since then, it’s become clear that they’re just not that into us. And we’ve been hanging on, making ourselves more like them to get them to like us more. Fuck that. It’s time for the post-break up makeover. We’ve got to make our way of doing things, of living, of being, so beautiful and enticing and incredible that the power comes crawling back. Anyway, by quitting that fight, we regain our own power. Right makes Right, as T.H. White says in The Once and Future King--Might (or money, now) does not make Right. Also, I'm pretty certain that the smaller, tighter, more effective lives of people actively living in the ways that make them happy—truly happy, in the ways that buying more and bigger and “better” stuff never will—is the best answer to how to live in the first place. Living like this is likely to make us all happier than trying to be something we’re not, than speaking a language that does not express the realities of our beliefs.

And, better than waiting for the pathetic loser of (most) U.S. Environmental Policy to crawl back, we can use our way to life to shape better policies. The United States remains steadfast in our mythology that we are governed by and for the people. We may have made corporations into people, but that’s idiotic. Corporations cannot march, cannot protest, cannot get into the actual heart of people. Turning this myth of what we say we are into who we actually are is going to be hard, but I think it can be done. Living in Boston, I find myself literally stumbling across pieces of the Revolutionary War. It happened once here, it could happen again. It should happen again, people rising up to remake their world better…heck, it might even be fun.

Trouble is, I feel a little like the deaf girl here myself—I want to speak these things, I want to do these things, but I do not have the right tools to even know where to begin. I suspect that a lot of people are in this same boat. Living simply and happily I’m working on—although it’s worth noting that I wrote most of this on paper napkins at work last night, in between waiting tables. Mostly, though, it’s the communal uprising I’m looking for. Anyone else? We should talk.

Happy Earth Day! Go fight the good fight, in whatever eco-battlefield or wild place makes you happy. I wish you the peace and ferocity of wild things.

In Praise of Sweat

Thursday night, before my city became paralyzed with the brief, strange confusion of “sheltering in place,” I attended a vigil for the marathon bombing. The wind was blowing hard, the half-mast flags snapping in the darkness. It was hard to hear—the wind was blowing across the speakers with this strange hollow-thunder noise. I loved that, the wind making itself known, this invisible force that can only be seen and felt in the reactions of what it touches. Like love, really. Someone read a poem, and other people sang, and it did what those tools do—opened hearts enough and pointed to the soft places in our souls where a scrap of comfort, if not understanding, can creep in. I was most moved by the runners who spoke. They talked of their community, of the love and support they find, of the comfort and challenge and addiction of running. Their words, these runners, were as moving as the poetry, the songs, the wind. In the end, it’s all the same thing.

I am not a runner. A marathon is something far beyond my abilities, or interests. When the world overwhelms me--as it has this week--I go to words. I read, I write, I re-find my sanity, my faith in humanity, my calm place to go forward with this often hard and messy business of being human on this earth, my best thing to give the world I love so fiercely. I know many people run for the same reasons. They pull on little fluorescent shorts, lace up their sneakers and go, pounding their hearts into the trails and pavements, until life comes back to focus, back to size. Other people take to their guitars, their pianos, their churches, mountains, oceans, deserts, kitchens, equations, woodshops, gardens…their best thing, the instrument or action they have where they can best give and receive of the good of the world. And where they can muddle some sense from the darkness. May we all find this thing, and soon.

My sisters are both runners, and in general, far better athletes than I am. I dabble, I enjoy, I stop to look at things and take pictures and come home and write essays and poems about all that I’ve seen and then wander about in a poetic, world-loving daze. That’s fine, and really, it gets a lot of attention for being a Good thing to do. I like to think that my words are the best I can give the world, and I find a lot of reassurance on that front.

But, my sisters and their running brethren go out and sweat and empty their bodies and find something like peace and happiness through that strength. They choose a hard thing, and take delight in their abilities. My older sister ran a half-marathon on a whim a few summers ago. (She admitted the next day to being “a little tired.”) After the events of this week, she, like many others, is looking for a marathon to run and hoping to qualify for Boston.

A friend told me this week that he cries watching marathons, that the power of that mental and physical commitment always impresses him. When I think of all that brings me to my knees as being beautiful—passion, effort, good-intention, and a holy glow at what humans are capable of—I cannot think how I overlooked how inspiring and glorious running is, or, really, all athletics are. What the human body is capable of is no less soul-inspiring than what the human mind, the human heart can do. We are becoming a nation that does not know our bodies well—we are no longer required to be physically strong in order to eat. And so, such physical strength and the body’s natural grace often becomes a sport, a game. Except that it shows us yet another way in which we can be wonderful, malleable, resilient. “Or haven't you noticed just how invincible and unbeatable spirit is, so that its presence makes the whole soul fearless and unconquerable in any situation?” Socrates asked that in The Republic.

How that spirit presents itself varies. For which I’m grateful. But here, for a little while, I’d like to lay all that I can, all my words and the best intentions of my spirit, at the feet of the runners. Your efforts, your sweat, your struggles, your success, your choice and joy in these actions…this is as beautiful and as needed as any words spoken to a lonely crowd on a dark night, seeking comfort.

Today, while listening to the news of the largest manhunt in U.S. history, I didn’t know what to do, so I started writing this. I made art, I read poetry. When, finally, the world became a little safer, I went outside. Some of the first people I saw on the quiet streets were runners. It almost made me dig out my running shoes.

Perspective

The Boston Marathon was bombed yesterday.

I spoke with my father this morning about it all—yesterday morning he’d emailed me with utter glee to say he had tickets to a Red Sox game for us. Today, he was struggling with the thought, as too many of us are, of how a fun sporting event so quickly slid into horror.

Two of my dearest friends were at the bombing site, with their infant daughter, ten minutes before the bombs went off. Safe, but by the sort of slim margin that will linger for a long time.

I thank whatever I’m calling god today that, at this moment, no one I know was hurt in the blasts. And I’m praying to that same space in my heart for those who were hurt, for all that was so sweet about a crowd gathered for a marathon, and was irrevocably lost in the blast.

News like this fills my chest with rage. My breathing changes, my fists clench and if it would do any good, I’d punch holes in walls and yell my throat ragged. Being enough distant from actual grief, such keening is both inappropriate and inadequate.

But the rage doesn’t have such boundaries. I hate this sort of violence. To live in a world where this happens makes my skin hurt and I wish I could crawl out of it all. How does this happen, and worse, how does this keep happening?

I’ve had the radio on all day, listening to the same few facts get chewed over and over. We know nothing seems to be the only conclusion. We know nothing, except that people ran towards the explosion to help, even before the second bomb went off.

This human decency is supposed to be a balm of some sort. It is, I suppose. But I’m furiously sad that we’re forced to find any good here. Because here, as every time, the good does not outshine the bad, the light does not negate the dark. Are these horrors—all horrors—some how “okay” because people are people and band together and help each other when our legs are blown off, when our brightest days shadowed?

I think not, and I resent the implication of silver-lining finding that makes it so. At worst, I hate the thought that we need tragedy to re-teach us to be kind to each other.

Why can’t we pull together, why can’t we be better humans, why can’t we run headlong into danger and explosion and fear and the unknown before the bombs go off? Such events have authors, such authors have reasons, such reasons could be found, inquired, mitigated. Something. Anything would be better than this locking of doors after the horses escape.

For now, I suppose, Boston is my city. And as such, I suppose that I should feel something more for this bombing that I should for any of the other explosions and mass tragedies that pepper the globe on a daily basis. But I don’t. I’m just plain against all such acts, foreign and domestic. Against all such acts, foreign or domestic in origin.

In this world, in this time, I find that simply sharing a zip code with someone isn’t enough to have their death weigh more heavily on my soul than any other stranger. I see the pictures, and listen to the coverage of explosions and people screaming. The people saying “it was like a war zone.” There are people living every day in war zones—do they deserve less of my heart than the crowds of innocents gathered yesterday in Boston?

I do not mean to disparage either the crimes of yesterday, or the tragic beauty of the human response. I ask only that we try to multiply our understanding, our empathy. Such similar scenes—frightened people running, inexplicable bombs and injury and dead—happen daily. Often, we are responsible. If We Stand United, if We are all Boston and Newtown and New York and Columbine and Oklahoma City and Atlanta and any other of our domestic scenes of terror and violence, should we not also be held to a higher accountability for what else is done in our name? Wars, drone strikes, slaughtered civilians, genocides we dare not dirty our hands with by intervening…all this is done and not done in our name, as Americans.

I say some of this to my father. He says he does not have my width of perspective. It is not a judgment. He is not small-minded and I am not callously large-minded. He called to make sure my friends’ infant was safe—his were the sweet and immediate concerns of a parent, concerns I cannot yet share and may never. But, further, we are of difference generations. I have traveled more widely, bounced around this country and this globe with the ease of my generation. I have seen the lines on maps melt as I cross them. A friend said today, “borders are imaginary, people are real.”

If there is an upside of globalization—and that is a big if—then this is it: those of us who have seen how a hundred different “others” live must learn to live and be in a way that honors those others and lets them live. To me, this means turning the rage against one violent act against all violent acts. This means seeing the seeds of violence before they bear fiery, bloody fruit. This may mean turning our hearts and minds inside out to understand what would drive a person to violence, and this means that we may not like the answer. I believe that violence comes from the darkness lurking inside each of us. What causes the darkness to  explode out, to seep into others’ lives so violently is unpleasant territory. But we must know why, we must ask why. Without those questions, we will never know how to stem the flood, how to heal the original hurt, and there will be more violence.

I am thirty-one. I have never been to war. I have never seen a person die. And, yet, I find that I have seen more than enough violence to last me my lifetime.

Haven’t you?

The World Is Changing

Other than my wracking sobs for fictional characters, the most distressing part of the latest season of Downton Abbey was that I forgot to keep track of the number of time that words to the effect of "the world is changing" were said. I think that sentiment permeated the season as much as lavender and starch permeate the Dowager Countess's unmentionables.

I know that when you hold a hammer, every problem looks like a nail, but I couldn’t watch the beautiful, wasteful, opulence of life at Downton without thinking of the present world. Thoughts on climate change and income inequality and class, gender, and identity struggles all flitted through my head while I watched the beautiful people on the little screen try to keep their lovely home and ancestral heritage stable as the world changes. All that over-consumption, crumbling as the necessary support networks falter…climate change may be my hammer, but I don’t think I’m wrong with the analogy. The show is still a soap opera, I still watch it mostly for the beautiful clothes and the Dowager’s snarky, silky retorts, but just because it is fluff, doesn’t mean some truth and beauty and intelligence can’t be there also.

The people who seem to get truly screwed in Downton—as perhaps, in our current reality—are the parents. They’ve been raised one way, expect certain truths to remain true, and are hurt when life deviates from their plan. The grandparent-aged folk have enough experience and perspective to handle a certain amount of change. And, then the young people are leading the charge, demanding that, if the world is changing, that we must change with it. If this sounds familiar to anyone else, I won’t be surprised. Some friends and I have been talking about how the ramped-up over consumption of the last fifty years has been in service to the Baby Boomer generation, and, to quell the literal rising tides, that we need to return to, remember, the harder, more skilled, smaller lives and greater capabilities of our grandparents’ generations and farther back.

I think of this every time another friend takes up canning. Or knitting. Or farming. These things may be trendy and hipster, but also, they are useful skills for life. I try not to think that some Cormac McCarthy-esque Apocalypse is nigh with climate change and increasing economic inequality and joblessness, but I do think there will come a time where to use less will not be a choice. I’d prefer to learn how to be capable before there is a need, and there is sweetness in making an active choice. The world is changing and we must change or go extinct, as they say in Downton.

I am already frightened for this summer’s wildfire season in the West, for the hurricane season along coastlines that are still raw from last year, for whatever slings and arrows and emergencies we’ve forced ourselves to weather this year. It is more than time to change, the world has already changed, continues to do so, and we must change, and quickly, to live in the world we’ve created. Or it, and we, will go extinct. For my part, there is still too much that is wonderful to give up now. Battered and hot and crowded and problematic as this world is, I think it’s still worth fighting to hold on to. And little actions, like learning to be more self-sufficient and kinder, may not be enough of a weapon. But they are a good, well-intentioned, start towards change.

One of my favorite storylines of Downton has been Lady Sybil falling in love with the Irish Catholic Revolutionary chauffer, Tom Branson. I think that any one of those identities would be enough to sink his battleship amid the Crawleys. They certainly threaten to, a new mark against the man appears pretty much every time he does. Without saying too much, what I most loved about this latest season was watching him come into peace with his old identity and his new as a member of an aristocratic, English, Anglican, family. Rather than fight for Home Rule in Ireland, rather than firebomb and terrorize the countryside in service to his (rightful) passions, he turns back to land and family, and gives himself in service to those ideals.

John Adams, who I like for being persnickety and overly verbose and for helping Abigail Adams to some prominence, wrote “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.” I think that this is the source of the somewhat watered down, “I am a revolutionary so my son can be a farmer and his son can be a poet.” I’ve seen that line attributed to both Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, but I’m going to demonstrate a small bit of loyalty to my new state and give it, here, to Adams.

I don’t see why revolutionaries can’t be farmers and poets. In truth, I don’t see a better way.