Because I Am Silent

I'm sitting here thinking, a dangerous thing to be sure; but considering the current lack of action on my thoughts you can presume the world to be safe, for now. As for my title, that is the loose topic of these particular thoughts. It seems funny doesn't it? When you consider the fact that I am hardly ever silent, but it may surprise many people that I, along with just about every member of humankind, choose to be silent at the worst times possible consistently.

You know the times I'm talking about, you overhear something and toy with the idea of interjecting a thought or idea you believe could be useful or important, and, in the end, you don't. Or, you're talking to someone you don't know very well and have the desire to challenge them or present something a little deeper than the conversation merits and you hold back. Or you're talking to someone you know like family and don't say what you want to because you're leery of where it will lead. I've been there so many times and still after every such encounter with this conflict I find myself doing it again and again as if I have no other choice but to deny myself the right and responsibility to speak.

I know (perhaps better than most) the "domino effect" one action, or even one word, can have. I know that life is short. I'm well acquainted with death of every kind. And I allow myself to believe that I matter, if only for a while. Yet when I'm standing there warm and safe behind my cozy mask of independence from my head and my heart, I am no longer a deep thinker, a free thinker, or any sort of thinker at all. I'm a silent smile and a nod, nothing more. I'm a flag without a country, a war without a cause. Sometimes I wish I could step away from my life, my sphere of influence, my own eyes, and watch those little chain reactions occur. I would then rewind it all to watch every last one of the endless alternate endings. I doubt it would be so easy then to smile and forget.

What would it be like to be free of the entangling garments of political correctness, and the restrictive nature of fear, the fear of standing all alone, to be naked and at the same time comfortable, covered by the skin of what I believe what and who I am alone? To have the words from my lips be as relieving and uninhibited as an infant's first throaty cry in this screwed up world.

Someday I'll know, but today I dress in layers as does everyone else, I'll blend in by being "one of a kind" (the same kind as all the others standing in defiance of normalcy) as is in fashion nowadays. I'll bind apathy and nearsightedness around my neck and wear it like I'm proud of this most beautiful crime against man.

Maybe someone's silly heart will melt at the sight of my "pretty face." My own heart will indulge sweet nothings because this vulgarity is the accepted way to pass time. There will be no thought or question to seeking beauty of a cherished kindred soul, for that is as absurd and foreign a thought as there ever was.

What enemies would I befriend should they be, in truth, naked before my jaded mind? How great a number of conflicts could be solved simply by listening instead of seeing? Who knows...?

The Problem with Compassion

I'm trying to choke down the lump that's rising in my throat, the one that always seems come right before tears. A little ten year old aboriginal girl raped by ten young guys who have since shown no remorse and received no sentence. They're walking the streets this very evening.

I want those boys to die, plain and simple, and I want it to be unpleasant (that's the ladylike way of saying it). I don't love them, I don't want to. A child feels worthless, filthy, unloved, like she has no value at all and not only could it have been avoided but afterward there could have, and should have, been consequences, justice.

The reasons the judge gave for letting the boys off make about as much sense to me a wearing a parka in Townsville. She said that after interviewing each one she saw that they had no remorse for their actions and did not even seem to understand that what they did was wrong. So she let them go with the condition that they get rehabilitated. Rehabilitated. The word tastes like dirt in my mouth.

Ten years old, forced to have sex with every member of a street gang, each of them with a criminal record as long as a city block, each one of them from first class dysfunction. It wasn't her first encounter with them either, she was attacked and physically abused (her tiny body probably not serviceable to grown men back then), she was beaten. She had been in foster care in a better town and family on the other side of the continent, the state insisted on giving her real family a chance to see her despite admonitions from everyone against it, so she went for a visit and refused to leave because of the same old, same old- she was promised that things would be "different". It wasn't two days after she was "home" that this attack happened, her parents were absent from her life as before, probably in a drunken stupor in a pub or at home.

Why does this happen!? Why does the "state" always win and in winning, in all political correctness, leave a smeared, bloody trail of lives that will never be the same again. Then they throw money at it. I hate it. But more than that I hate how hopeless it makes me feel.

I want to believe that I can help some of these kids heal. I want to think that I can send them into the rest of their lives not fearing the drive home. I want to believe that I can love them enough that the unlovely things fade even a little. But as I'm sitting here reflecting on this child's story, I doubt, with every part of me I doubt that there is enough love in all of the world to restore her heart, her emotions, her outlook, her self-image. I want to hold her, to show her an embrace that shelters instead of shatters. I want to never let go. And I want to take them all, just like that. All the precious infants, broken before they get to start.

Why is this my passion? Why do I NEED to reach THEM? Why do their stories and faces fill me with this grave determination to achieve the impossible?

I about took the head off a guy in the lecture room today as we were discussing this. He played the mercy card. He was trying to communicate a valid point, that people commit crimes but they aren't the crimes the commit. The concept of separating people from the things that they do is something that I struggle with. If I was labeled with everything I've ever done... I still wouldn't have ones that said "Rape of a child", "Murder", "Assault", "Battery". And that's where my thoughts tend to end, I still would match up like a saint in comparison and I'm no angel.

What makes matters worse is I know the answers to my own questions in this. I know that if I love these children they will at the very least be given a powerful tool called hope. Hope that their value doesn't rest in the filthy hands of those who have broken their spirits. Hope that love though not necessarily a happily ever after can be attained and not at the cost of the selling of their souls.

This knowledge however does very little in the way of encouraging me at the moment, because right now somewhere in this country, a little girl unnamed by the media is probably fighting nightmares and tears, or worse, no emotions at all, sleeping like the dead seared completely of all feeling. Tonight I can't help her.

Grave Musings...

I walked through a small graveyard today. The headstones, berated by the weather, stood in fading acknowledgement to lives long since lived out. As I entered the restful site I encountered a thought as to the overall sameness that made the graves appear to me a cluttered mass of of concrete and iron fences as indistinguishable from one another as the decaying bones they housed. With growing agitation and yet mysteriously compelled into a revering silence I wove a destinationless path between the modest monuments, and I read. I cannot believe that death is, in itself, evil but only terrifyingly blind. Stone after stone bore names of infants so young to life one could have easily counted the number of their living breaths. Often mother and child were named together, joined as long as the words survive due to a tragic end to a new beginning for each. Other names were followed by dates to the front and back of seventy and eighty years. Many headstones had poetry, a phrase, and some only one word. These aging captions morbidly fascinated me, to think, and entire life layed to rest beneath the banner of a single word!! I did not think there existed such words, in the English language at least; to sum up a day in a word is a challenge at times, but a life? I wouldn't desire to make that particular choice of words... My ponderings carried me in a jagged circuit. As my interest grew so did the dawning awareness that I walked amongst what was much less like indistinguishable rubble and more like a crowd, with faces, real people. Some would find this alarming, I was endeared.

I Challenge You

Are you listening?
Are you frightened by the sound of
time rushing, whispering?
Can you hear it now,
the anxious cry to be
something else while you can?

Are you happy there, with a vacant stare?
Can you even imagine,
a slice of the world in your hands?
A lost cause? you feel hopeless.
You don't have to be helpless,
or do you?

You laugh at your misery,
dance while in agony,
but the show's just for you.
And the applause is dying,
your "fun" is running with the tears
on your bitter face.

Don't follow your dreams
they won't move on their own,
If only you'll lead them, they'll go where you go.
I won't pretend to empower you
for all I can really do is
speak the truth, and challenge you.

I challenge you to trust
to be hurting if that's what it takes,
to be strong, to walk on for a while.
What can change
if the view stays the same?
I challenge you.

the unfailing anomaly...

I'm sitting here at the computer listening to Taylor Swift's lovely sexy voice singing of an uncooperative lover; "...I've never been anywhere cold as you...". The song moves me somehow not because I can truly empathize, I've never been there. No what hangs me up is one little line:
"You have a way of coming easily to me... So I start a fight 'cause I need to feel somethin'..." Before you start guessing where I'm going, pause for a sec, I'm not going there. I'm not going to talk about love or pain or any emotion really.
I am going to talk about reactions, perspective. As Abraham Lincoln put it "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." Someone somewhere knows the truth in every aspect of a situation because the truth for that moment was their life, literally.
They lived something and no one else may ever know the truth of that moment, not that they won't try to communicate it but people are who they are, see what they see, and do what they want, such is life. But I think, and I may be wrong as I often am, that the truth is not subject to perspective or reactions. Everyone would concede that "nobody's perfect". So, if no one is perfect than there's got to be a perfect somewhere, grey areas cannot exist where there are no extremes.
Back to the song... All the intuition I possess tells me that she felt "nothing" and most likely everyone (starting with the guy) was surprised. It's a fact, she did feel nothing. No one saw it, doesn't mean the numbness wasn't real, the resulting pain sheer imagination.
The song then becomes perception, she calls him cold, he may have been a poor communicator, a tightly guarded heart. Cold is what she saw, not necessarily what was there, after all she was the one who claimed the chill.
I said I wasn't going to talk about emotions but they tie in here. We usually choose the tangible portions of an experience out of laziness/convenience, but you can't touch truth (even hard evidence is not the truth itself). Feelings, but more especially memories of feelings, can be tweak, twisted, and at times unrecognizably altered. Who wants to remember a boring trip o a history museum when they could remember and exaggerate that unbelievable sensation when that hot senior brushed against their arm in the lobby of the blasted place. See?
Perception and reality are all too similar, they'll look identical but one is always a clever fake, fabrication, a figment.

The Nothing Box

As I was watching TV the other day, my show went to commercials and so I lazily clicked through the channels until, for some reason, I stopped for a moment on a live lecture with a huge stage backdrop that read "NOTHING BOX". Intrigued I listened for a few minutes and found that the program was about the place where men go to "veg" during stress or just down time, and why women, hard as we try, cannot go there. The "Nothing Box" it seems, is the place where guys are (mentally) when they are staring blankly into space and seem distracted or disinterested in what we females are saying. Apparently, when you ask a man what he is thinking and he answers "nothing" he may be very well be telling the truth! And why can't women go there? Well, because if we invaded a guy's "Nothing Box" we would be shocked to discover that there was actually nothing there. We would immediately start decorating, arranging, and filling the nothing with somethings, driving the poor guys insane. We don't want to idle our minds and vegetate, we want to talk about stuff. Guys need an escape (usually from us). Thus we females are forever banned from the "World of Nothingness", but maybe it's better that way after all.

Still, whenever I see a guy sitting in silence with a blank look on his face, lost to the world, I wonder... what is it like? When a girl gets a blank look on her face it's there for one of two reasons, one, she didn't put it there on purpose; she has no control over that one cell; or two, it's a facade to lull whatever she's talking to into a sense of secure superiority. It's a fun look to get good at.

The Other Side of Never

Yesterday was my day off and I got to spend most of it just relaxing with small amounts of privacy here and there and therefore I was able to enjoy minimal amounts of a favorite indoor pastime: staring vacantly at a blank sheet of paper and waiting for inspiration to come. It did and what I wound up with I placed below, enjoy.

In the middle of Never there's a little couch made entirely out memory foam. I know this because I poked it once and the little round dimple that my finger made stayed there for what seemed like forever. There's also very awkward gold lamp that I can only assume was left there for the very reason that anything is ever left behind anywhere: something was more distracting. I could also fairly say that it was probably left behind on purpose because Never is a very deliberate place. The third object that stands out to me is, well, I'm not precisely sure what it is. It vaguely resembles a very dirty spoon only that it is significantly larger and quite pointy and sharp on one end as if someone intentionally honed it for use as a weapon of some kind (I mentioned this being a very deliberate place); it stands between my height and that of the unfortunate lamp.
I find after visiting this place that the terse chastisement to "never say never" (favored mainly by parental figures) is largely an exaggerated fear of the unknown passed from generation to generation; it's silly really for never is, for the most part, dually enchanting.
However, communication can be an obstacle with the native Neverinians as they never say what they mean but never lie. They never speak to strangers yet they never discriminate. The laws also are particularly confusing but -as a word to the wise - never follow them as the Neverinian police officers never make arrests. So you can see how city life could be a bit of a challenge (though never crowded, leaving that delicious couch never occupied), country life is much more enjoyable.
The most delightful vacations I've spent in Never have been on the other side (near the border with Always). The sky is a swirled palette of innocuous shades of grey so unoffensive to the eye that one could find themselves drifting listlessly in a dreamlike state almost instantaneously. The air smells of fresh snow but feels like warm restless breath on the skin. There's nothing to do and not much of anyone to do it with but no one seems to mind at all, in fact, no one seems to mind much about anything at all, I thinks it's the sky. The water is another thing entirely, to say it is still would be a understatement worthy of reproach, it is as if a tingling curse hovers over the expanse and repeats a silent tranquil chant, compelling every molecule to stand in place for eternity. One would think such a place would be terrifying and unpleasant, but the atmosphere, however calm and eerie, is far from unpleasant. The water's surface reflects not only the grey skies far above it but also whimsical images that can only lie in the world between the two, unseen except in this glassy pantheon. This is where I usually pass the hours, upon the very shores of peace itself.