the death of the enemy

It had already been a frustrating morning.  I was in the copy room at the laboratory where I worked, trying to figure out a way to placate a pathologically irritating client with his most recent inane request.   The phone call a few minutes earlier hadn’t ended well and I looked forward to a day filled with chasing down rabbits with little hope of success.  Never mind that I had better things to do.

Just then, a co-worker jammed her head into the room with the news: “A bomb just went off in the World Trade Center!”

'Whatever...stupid rumor mill,'  I thought to myself.  It took another, more credible, source to get me thinking maybe something was actually serious.

As we huddled around the tiny television in somebody’s office, we watched in disbelief and horror as they replayed the planes crashing into the buildings...the first tower imploding and then...right there...live...the second tower.  Gone.  The suffocating flatness.  The hole in the skyline.  The stampede of dust.  The images of papers floating in the air clenched and scratched at our bones.

In the hours following, I remember a sense of terrified unknowns.  What did this mean?  Who did it?  What was going to happen next?  Why would someone do something like this? 

Then the gas paranoia hit.  As I fumbled my way home a few hours later, I was too tired and too frantic to wait in line.  Besides, I had a pretty full tank.  People were stocking up at the grocery store too.  I called my (younger) sister, the often more level-headed of us two, who was also my roommate at the time.  “Just go home…and calm down, honey...I'll be there soon.”  She has often been the one to talk me down off the ledge.

In the days following, I remember a sense of wanting to do Important Things.  Connect with my estranged father, who actually lives in NYC, and make sure he’s okay.  Call my mom.  I think.  I can’t remember if she was talking to me then.  Spend time watching the news, huddled on the couch with my sister, while on the phone with my brother, two states away.  Hug strangers in the store.  Pray for the people grieving the loss of loved ones.  Watch and weep with the people of New York. 

Also during this time, I remember a sense of national, brotherly affection and balmy, universal grace that was present everywhere and even being extended from across the oceans.  The camaraderie we all felt soothed our souls as we watched President Bush and Mayor Giuliani stand on those terrible heaps of twisted steel and do what they could to help ease the suffering. And all those firemen.  All those officers.  Each one banding together, streaming in from outlying states, doing their individual and collective best.  It eased the spirit in many ways.  There was a sense of 'We’re going to make it.  We’re sticking together and we’ll get through this.'

But then the anthrax paranoia hit.   It wasn't over.  Nothing was over, really.  Or so it felt.  And the wheels came off again at realizing the worst could still be ahead.  Worse than worse...it might even strike much, much closer to my home.   The anxiety was palpable.  It didn’t take too long to realize it was more of a paper tiger, but I was certainly scared a time or twenty on the way to the mailbox.

Then we got word on where to place the blame.  I remember first thinking of my uncle in California, a beloved and hilarious uncle, a Muslim and an Iraqi Kurd, with family still abroad.

Then came the swelling, sickening surge of the “Power of Pride”.

Then came the hatred of our “common” enemy. 

Then came Shock and Awe. 

Then came a war.

Then came another war.

Then came the death of our servicemen and women in greater numbers than those killed on 9/11.

Then came the death of (conservatively) thirty times more innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan than our 9/11. 

***

Last Monday, I crawled out of bed and made my way out to our dining room, where Finch was finishing his breakfast, as he readied for work.  As is always the case, the tiny earbuds bringing him the morning’s news brief on NPR, while he reads his latest issue of The Economist, were securely in place.  After hearing me enter the room, he pulled one out and flatly relayed the news that, apparently, Osama bin Laden had been killed the previous night by U.S. Special Forces.

***

As a mother now, the background of my mental landscape is taken up with questions like, 'Will my child become a monster because of my mistakes?'  'How can I teach my children to care about the burdens of  other people, not just their own, when they could easily sense my irritation over the single-mom neighbor who lets her dog poop in my front yard and then doesn't clean it up?'  'How can I help my children empathize with the feelings of others when I can’t even empathize with my 5-year-old’s issues, which likely arise from spending his early life in an orphanage?'  'How can I build compassion into my children’s lives when the key refrain shouted out by my actions is often: my needs, my comfort, my wants…who’s going to take care of MEMEME?'  'How can I foster a belief in my children that the intellect and talents they are given, and the time and money they are allowed to have on this earth, are not solely for their own use and entertainment, when, um, that is rarely how it plays out in my life?'  'How can I encourage my children, who are themselves a part of a transracial and trascultural family, to respect and value the differences of others when, at times, I myself am uncomfortable with them?'

(Just to be clear, I do not presume that I will complete my daily, even hourly, mothering mistake-free, or even that that is the goal.  Nor do I begrudge honest irritations, which doesn't even touch on indignation over willful crimes--a subject I will not dig into here.  And I certainly won't deny a healthy need to take care of myself in order to be in a position to care properly for others, namely, my small children.  I refer above to the human tendency, my own tendency, toward excess of such things and the possible effects on others.)  

The foreground is taken up with the mundane and pointless stuff aplenty, and I am choked with the take-care-of-my-home-and-family-and-job-stuff.  But...if I pay attention...if I don’t distract myself with the million tiny things that are immediately available to distract me...if I quiet down long enough and think…the background often starts making a lot of noise. 

***

Finch and I love to watch movies on the weekend.  But, especially since I became a mother, I have to read plot summaries/spoilers on Wikipedia to see if I can stomach watching the film in question.  Finch is incredibly patient with this certainly frustrating quirk of mine.  What it boils down to is this: I can’t watch any kind of human torment without thinking, 'What if that was my son or daughter?'  'What if that was my husband?'  'What if that was my brother or sister?'  'What if that happened to me?'  And then imagining if it really did?  Comes close to ruining me.  I don't know what led to this state of affairs, but I can't seem to put any mental distance between myself and these stories.

When I was in college, one night a gang of us were mulling around our dorm and ended up gathered in someone's room to watch the movie Murder in the First, starring Kevin Bacon.  This was the first time I remember having such a visceral reaction to a movie.  I started gagging when Gary Oldman's character indulged his dark side on Kevin Bacon's character.  I spent the next 20 minutes in the bathroom with a friend.

Before I became a mother, Finch and I went to a theater to see the movie Cold Mountain.  I like Nicole Kidman; I like Renee Zellweger.  I made it to the part where Kathy Baker gets tied up to her fence and tortured by military men in search of her husband and sons who had deserted the war.  (They had already killed her husband at this point.)  She is then forced to watch helplessly, as her sons come out from hiding in the barn to come to her aid and get shot, one by one, in front of her.  Finch, abruptly noticing the quiet meltdown going on next to him, told me to get up and walk out with him, as they “got what they deserved”.  He nearly had to carry me out of the theater.   

I made the mistake of watching The Good Shepard with Matt Damon awhile back, after we were home with the children.  The whole thing generally fostered in me a sense of wanting to divorce myself from this American society.  And that part where the wrong man gets tortured to the point of committing suicide?  Bummer, dude.  That was when we instituted the Wikipedia Agreement. 

Then there is the newish movie, Taken, with Liam Neeson, the very thought of which crushes me and makes me weep and find my daughter for a long cuddling session.  Of course I’ve never seen it.  But what makes it so heinous is that it is a movie about things, tip-of-the-iceberg things, that are actually going on now, right now, right as I type this sentence, and every sentence after it, and every minute of every day. 

God, please have mercy on the little child enduring this right now.  Please deliver her/him into safety.

These movies...based on true events or not...all point to the evil, the terrible, shattering evil that any one of us is capable of perpetrating if we walked a similar path.  This is of course the most disturbing part.   What brings a person to the conviction that what they are doing is okay, when what they are doing is evil?

Because in the end, reality is horrifying.  There is this and what drives it.  There is worse than Osama bin Laden, with too little being done about it. 

So I'm okay with how these images affect me.  I think it might, just maybe, even though it is inconvenient and silly, be a good thing.  Maybe someday it will bother me enough, I will get fed up enough, it will make me sick enough, and I will find enough others at the same point, to really figure out a way to do something about it.  

***

Besides keeping up on friends' blogs, I have a handful of blogs I visit regularly:  Rage Against the Minivan, Her Bad Mother, Nicholas Kristof, Shutter Sisters, Lisa Leonard Designs, and even Pioneer Woman, at times.  Then there is one more:  Welcome to my Brain.  I really, really love this site, but I can only take it in spurts.  It overwhelms me.  Every time I catch up on her posts, I feel taken apart and put back together in the kindest and most exacting of ways.  She is astonishing.   What she is doing, and the way she is living her life, make me want to sell all my stupid, stupid crap and move in next door to her.  I have a feeling I wouldn’t even have to twist Finch’s arm very much.  He is always ahead of me in this stuff.  Besides, then he could finally get his chickens. 

A few days back, she posted the following bit from a TED conference, a conference/website which I had somewhat recently heard about from Her Bad Mother.  Good stuff.  Crazy good stuff.  I was excited to watch the clip, anticipating the goodness ahead.  And?  Wow.  Here it is:

On Being Wrong

by Kathryn Schulz

In a few posts above this on her site, and referencing the clip, Christine’s ambivalence over ObL’s death, and its effect on our nation, articulated some of my own conflicted thoughts.  I get that the Empire is going to celebrate.  It just troubles me.

And then we jump back behind our party lines with our hands on our hips and chins in the air.

Must divisiveness always rule the day in this country?

Oh, but wait, I don’t even need to look that far.

It rules in my heart.

As I listened to the clip above, I felt my chest puff out, and then I felt it deflate, at the realization of what I was thinking.  In the end, I felt small.  I am often that coyote, a ways off the end of the cliff and not-just-yet aware of it.  I am happy to believe I am never wrong.  I am at times happy to assassinate an opponent’s character to get someone to choose the person or idea I think is More Worthy.  I am often content to live on vapid, selfish convictions with too little evidence at their foundation, just to be a part of the Informed and Intellectual Opinion of the moment.   I make these:

1. The Ignorance Assumption. "We assume they don't have access to the same information we do, but if they did, SURELY we would agree. When we then discover that, in fact, they DO have the same information, we move to the second assumption..."

2. The Idiocy Assumption. "We have to think that they have all the information they need, but must be too stupid to figure out what is right. Yet, sometimes this involves people we know and we can't ignore the fact that we believe some of these people actually have a reasonable degree of intelligence. So, we then move along to a third assumption to solidify our rightness..."

3. The Evil Assumption. "They know they truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes."

In summary Kathryn Schulz says: "This is a catastrophe. This attachment to our own rightness keeps us from preventing mistakes when we absolutely need to, and causes us to treat each other terribly."

***

So I go back and think about what I hope to teach my children and the failures that too often hijack those hopes.  And I think about those films.  Then I think about reality.  

I think about Hitler.  

I think about Joseph Kony.

I think about Osama bin Laden.  

Where did they go wrong?  Where did he go wrong?  Why was he so convinced that he was right?  I'm sure you can guess that hastily dismissing the conversation after concluding, 'But I'd never do that!', isn't going to help anybody.

But, in a way, we can concede on that point.  We should start with what we can change.

So then, it's not long before I start wondering, I think we'd all do good to start wondering, why do I think I am always, always right, and there couldn't possibly be an alternate, reasonable view in the matter?  Or more specifically:  

Why is my candidate better than your candidate and why are you stupid for not realizing it?  

Why is my parenting method better than your parenting method and why must I therefore slander you or flat out denounce you to feel better about myself?

Why am I the one trying harder in my marriage and my spouse, he, HE is the one who is wrong and needs to work harder?

Why is my kid not trying harder to keep his damn pants dry...I have done everything, EVERYTHING to help him figure it out and he just doesn't care?   

Why is my interpretation of scripture/Christianity/Faith/God at large, the only possible non-heretical interpretation and why are you headed straight to hell if you disagree with me? 

Why do I dig in my heels when confronted with the alternatives, instead of taking a deep breath, telling my 'rightness demons' to simmer down and then start asking some good questions?  Why don't I listen better to the answers?  Why don't I spend a little more time considering that there might, just maybe, be a few holes in my ideology, or, possibly, other reasonable interpretations? 

Why don't I remember that I am, after all, just one human and there are a whole lot more out there than me, all of whom deserve my respect and kindness in this life?  

Why don't I err on the side of humanity, but especially this one human in front of me at this moment,  instead of pride? 

So that is what I am going to do.  I will suck at it sometimes, I am sure, but I will not be deterred.

Because the enemy?  The real enemy?  That is in me.  And it does, in fact, need to die. 

You can feel free to hold me accountable.