Lately, I am finding it very hard to be enthusiastic about environmental issues. I can’’t muster up the pom-poms for Earth Day or recycling or sustainable crops. Those issues seem far overshadowed by the reality of people being snatched off the streets by immigration enforcement thugs. These people are being literally disappeared, taken forcibly to unknown destinations with no ability to communicate with family or employers, probably unsure of where they’ve been taken. This is unconstitutional, and undemocratic, and the chief executive of the country doesn’t care. He is totally focused on demonizing immigrants, even those who landed here legally.
It’s difficult to watch this, difficult to hear about it. It’s frightening to know this is happening, and to be sure that if they can do it to these people they can do it to anyone. The law becomes irrelevant and totally meaningless. They are now disregarding the orders of judges who commanded them to suspend their deportation activities. They are paying Venezuela to accept people, some with no criminal record and objects of dubious misinformation that branded them as gang members, into a horrific prison that is overcrowded and notorious for torture and abysmal treatment of those incarcerated.
This is all revolting, because we should be better than this. But we’re not. We are no better than those we decreed were barbaric and had no respect for human rights, like the Taliban or people who kidnapped and beheaded foreigners for reasons of…well just because. Some of those killed have stuck with me, like Margaret Hassan, a British aid worker married to a middle-Easterner. She was kidnapped out of the blue one day, and held in a Taliban camp. She was forced to record videos that begged for payment of absurd amounts to save her life. One day, the news came that she had been killed, sent out of a tent blindfolded and shot by a sniper. I cannot forget her tear-stained face begging for her life, begging for her country to do whatever was demanded to secure her release. And she was not the first, nor the last.
The absurdity of all of this galls me. What did it change to murder a woman who had not engaged in hostility toward anyone, who was aiding innocent victims of war and occupation. What good did it do to behead journalists and foreign contractors? These are acts of depravity as far as I am concerned, and they have won no victories, no concessions, no change in policy, no peace. These are the false assertions of power by the powerless. These are the tantrums of those who have no voice, but try very hard to convince the rest of the world that they are in supreme control. Captains of their fate, masters of no one. Tragedy on all the fronts.
I cannot speak for the Taliban or the Iraqis or any middle-Eastern people, but I can speak for America. As the self-proclaimed greatest nation on the face of the Earth, we should damned well be above barbarism and cruelty. We should damned well be about the business of living by example, telling everyone there’s another way to further our enterprises than to un-alive and disappear those who have no power. We have crumpled enlightenment and thrown it in the face of the Divine. Some of us truly believe that our actions are entirely justified simply because we are who we say we are. I contend that we don’t know who the hell we are.
I was mentioning to someone earlier today that I have to remember that all of this insanity IS the revolution. It’s the labor pains before giving birth a new age, to the new way, what those of us who grew up in the 60s learned was the Age of Aquarius. People laughed at that, and by the turn of the new millennium most had discarded those colorful anthems as the result of smoking too much really good dope. We turned away from the vision of peace and love and harmony and understanding, only to let the images of the Viet Nam war become our dominant vision. We’ve been fighting a war on our own streets ever since, and we are now the aging offspring of generations who only know how to be at war. War against poverty, war against drugs, war against gangs, war against our own creations. I don’t think we’re supposed to know the why of all that, but we ARE supposed to know right from wrong. We ARE supposed to know this dominance game isn’t sustainable, and that it doesn’t get us anywhere. We ARE supposed to know how to quell our hypocrisy.
Winning the war is always short-lived, but we’ve never learned how to return to center. Perhaps we never will, but I would like to believe something else. I would like to have faith in humanity, in the promise of good, in creativity. We are only as good as what we can create, not in what we can do over and over expecting different results. I want to believe in us, in the collective heart of the world. I don’t believe in the promise of conquest and linear absolutism. There are gray areas, and infinite ways for each of us to make our way to Truth.
I hope we get it. I hope we get it before we destroy ourselves. The clock is ticking, and it’s counting down the minutes until the bomb blows. We might be able to avert the explosion if we can realize that we are living in abundance, and not scarcity. We’ll just have to see, but at some point we’re all going to wake up dead because nobody gets out of here alive. Maybe that’s when the work really begins. Saddle up, we ride at dawn.
The Sound Hole 