A poet can write about a man slaying a dragon, but not about a man pushing a button that releases a bomb.
W. H. Auden
Although I attempt to make them generally thoughtful and well researched, I know that my postings can sometimes tend toward the snide and snarky. This will not be one of those postings. I am fairly resilient (see snide and snarky) in facing the despair and frustration that can be triggered by events around. I am an optimistic person, but sometimes that resilience and optimism are profoundly challenged.
That challenge can come from single momentous event.
For me the most shattering public event of my lifetime was the assassination of Robert Kennedy. I idolized Robert Kennedy and his death came at I time when I was too young to see evil in the world, but old enough to see very clearly what had happened. It was a vertiginous loss.
I have never met anyone of my parents’ generation, not one single soul, who could not say where they were when they heard about the attack on Pearl Harbor and how they heard about it. Or where they were when they heard that Franklin Roosevelt had died and how they heard about it. Sixty and sixty five years later, those events are as vivid as wedding days and the births of children. The memory of those events gained power for having been shared as a culture.
There have only been two such events in my lifetime. The assassination of Dr. King has, I think, gained iconic status and universality over time, but in 1968 our culture was too fractured to embrace his true significance. The two events were the assassination of President Kennedy and the horrors of September 11, 2001.
I was in third grade when President Kennedy was shot, an event that was beyond my comprehension in a literal way at the time. However, in the same day I saw nuns and my father cry. That terrified me. I felt that the most horrible thing that could ever happen must have happened.
There are very few Americans who didn’t see and respond in very personal ways to the events of September 11, 2001, but we also responded as part of a nation with a sense of unity and purpose that it would be a gift to be able to recapture today. My own effort to cope that day was to watch news coverage for twelve hours, watch tape of those planes flying into those towers over and over again. I wasn’t looking for a different outcome or indulging a morbid preoccupation. I was watching for the moment of impact that would suddenly make the whole nightmare make sense. That coin has yet to drop.
Sometimes resilience and optimism can be worn away by an accumulation of incivility and inhumanity.
The so-called “tea baggers,” whether they brought 40,000 or 400,000 people to the mall, reflect a disconnect and a rage that runs far deeper than any of the particular policies they espouse or oppose. They are terrifying for the fissures they reflect and for visceral hostility with which they express them. There is a there there no matter how painful that is for some of us to acknowledge. Americans seem to be an angry people, driven into bunkers with no apparent way out. Does it really take planes flying into buildings to put our differences in perspective?
I also find that the numerous global and individual horrors reported in the news, today alone, have battered my spirit. CNN headlines for today include: Iran fires long-range missile in latest test, 3 charged with murder in Chicago teen's beating, and Boy says he was held in closet for years. From the intractable to the horrific and unimaginable. Maybe that’s the most debilitating part of all, that these horrors, children killing children and the vilest sort of abuse of children, have become not just imaginable but mundane.
In the face of such a world words feel wholly inadequate. Words can’t describe, words can’t prevent, words can’t heal.
That’s a difficult and debilitating thing for a writer to say and mean.
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