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.