IT'S THE MOST IMPORTANT and the simplest things we forget. So much energy poured away, or stones carried far and then dropped down in our own path and with our own hands. When I look at the world and the trouble in the world and this governments responses to trouble and too many parents' responses to their childrens' challenges, the criminal justice system and the razor rifts in our relationships, the rising hate crimes the war of terror the increasing militarization of culture...
I think of that story I was told as a child about the sun and the wind competing to make a man remove his coat. I think about how poorly most people respond to punishment or control tactics. I think of how quickly and easily the human being jumps into arguing, condemning, judging, fearing, negativity, and how easily we forget to breathe, relax our muscles, drink water, take care, nourish positivity. |
| I think of how good we can be at pushing people away when we want them to be near, or stoking our own anxiety when we want to be free from fear. I think of how quickly we can deny another what it is we most want ourselves.
I think of the "immigration issue." How much easier it seems to be for people to stoke up fear, talk about jails, talk about walls, operate as if we need to protect something from people, when they are part of all we are, when we can all help make each other's lives more full and beautiful and nobody has to lose. And yet, it seems it is so much easier to get people to fear and hoard than it is to convince them that they are safer when giving, sharing, taking care of others.
This human and stubborn negativity-attracting dynamic is only one of the obstacles The Sanctuary has to work against. The mainstream media and too much of the mainstream blogosphere: either absent from the moral conversation, vitriolic and opposed to anything except persecution, punishment, deportation or maybe just unaware of how to help. But even by remaining silent in the face of so many wrongs, Good People help the climate of fear and racism and xenophobia grow more dense and pervasive as it scoops up even well-meaning people and drops them down a horrible hole. ICE operates outside the law and under the radar and none of that much matters because who's gonna protest?
And yet, insultingly and depressingly, this imbecilic calculating political conversation rattles on, like a cracked shit-peanut inside a skeleton's head. Talk of Harsher Enforcement and More Walls and more raids! No matter how many children the aggression hurts or how many people it drags down into degradation pain or death; no matter how many families are torn into pieces or how much of our own social fabric is compromised by our insistent return to a duller, paler age when we thought we had to kill everything in our path, run from it, or hoard it before someone stole it right out of our cave. Still, we celebrate fear. Still, the fierce wind of ignorance rages and we wonder why this world can be so cold. |