How I Feel Today

                How I Feel About It Today           9/2/05

      I’m wondering why I quit the journal, and wondering if it matters, really.  I know that sounds cliché; such an existential comment, but I’m serious. 

    I think back over the span of years I’ve written off and on, and the questions that were burning in me, mostly outrageous reactions to the cruelty and stupidity of mankind, and maybe I got tired of writing because I got tired of the obvious, and just wanted to go sit someplace quiet and watch the birds, figuratively speaking.  I get tired of ranting when I realize it is just the human condition, and it’s not going to change in my lifetime. 

    And of course, there are some incidents that always bring out the most incredibly courageous and generous acts by people who are just as anonymous as you are, and that is comforting.  So then maybe, that’s why I got quiet, for so long.

    Anyway, the other reason is that I realized that my own quiet little life is the biggest statement I can make, anyway.  And just keeping track of that much is as much as I can handle.  There is my perspective.

    Huge events have happened.  The Twin Towers were knocked down and airplanes and evidence were sabotaged.  A war was initiated in Iraq and a dictator replaced.  A Tsunami proved a thousand times more treacherous than international politics, and now, hurricanes have wiped the gulf coast of North America with the broom of destruction, and tens of thousands are disenfranchised in that wake.

    I sit and watch TV while anchormen and women pour out their gutty reactions to what’s happening around them, listen to their outrage and their cries, and this too is the human condition.  I listen as politicians blame the president for the storm as if he were God, and I listen to commentators sitting forward criticizing the relief efforts, and I am grateful to know that I realize it is a miracle that people survived, that people are helping in the face of all this impossibility, that there is life after the holocaust, and you can live, if you want to, rather well, and even quietly, because you don’t really need that much, if you are grateful. 

    But still, it is astonishing how fat we are, and how messy, and how bossy, and how expensive.  We have such huge expectations of what should be done for us, and such low expectations of what we should do--these mentalities leave us so vulnerable, and make us so expendable.  What a huge amount of trash and garbage marks our catastrophes.  This confounds me, but it too is the human condition.  And even in the face of this selfishness, there are those people who are merciful.  In the end, the unique thing about the human is the gesture of love that defies reason.

   



    For generations beyond reach, we lived and left very faint footprints.

    You don’t really need to say that much, if you are grateful.