Trauma in an Insane World

So yes, the world is broken. We have fallen from the Garden. But this is just a reflection of our own broken relations. Instead of obsessing over the fallen state of the world, it is incumbent upon each of us to take universal responsibility by looking within. It is only from that internal place of healing and strength that we will find the cure for what ails the world.

Zhiwa Woodbury, from Healing Our Trauma Together in an Insane World

When my Lyft pulled up to the intersection near the school where I work, a line of cars blocked the view, but it wasn't hard to see how many police cars were parked alongside the building. I got out of the car and walked toward the corner, my heart beginning to race. Yellow tape blocked the perimeter of the school, and traffic was being diverted. It was Valentine's Day and the one-year anniversary of the Parkland shooting. I spoke to a bystander who told me that there had been a shooting outside the school. It's a Jewish school and synagogue. You don't need to know much more than that to feel dread. I was allowed to go into the school in a private entrance and faced a sort of controlled chaos that I won't soon forget. This is what happened. A self-identified transgendered woman (I am loathe to write that out, but it has context as for the next few hours we spoke of "him," and "the guy" and evidently those hunkered down in the identity wars claim that it's a sign of persecution) had roamed about the school for nearly an hour, surveying it and taking photos and videos with a sophisticated camera. This alarmed the armed security guard, for obvious reasons. It's a Jewish school. All of this was monitored inside by women in the office who can see everything through security cameras. The security guard asked the woman to stop taking photos. They "got into it." The women inside called the police. They called the police several times. The guard went inside the locked gate, an open vestibule that protects the inner, also locked door. We don't know what was going on inside the guard's mind, but eventually he pulled his gun out of the holster  (live-streamed by the woman who, it turns out, is a You Tuber) and cradled the gun, insisting that the woman stop filming the school. We don't know what prompted him to, but he shot the gun toward the sidewalk where it evidently ricocheted and hit the woman in the leg. All of this is on the woman's live stream with narration, including constant profanity. Eventually, the police came. They arrested the security guard and took the woman to the hospital who walked out with what is called "a graze." Meanwhile, back in the school we spent the remaining periods talking through the drama and calming the girls. It was intense. Later, we learned that the woman has a history of provoking incident at government facilities. She claims to be protecting the 1st Amendment. She does all of this live and streams it o YouTube. The language. You Tube. Live-stream. Transgender. Self-identified. Hate. The guard has been charged with committing assault with a deadly weapon.

I know what I think. I think it's insane to carry a gun. I think the belief that you are protecting yourself with a gun is dumb. I think it's unfortunate that the security guard felt he had to fire it. I think it's insane to believe that the YouTubers identity as a transgendered woman should be an issue in this story -- on any side. I think it's terrible to walk around a Jewish school in Los Angeles and live-stream the recording. I think YouTubers are sick and disturbed people, their vocation useless. I think it's horrible that the LAPD didn't respond more quickly and that the security guard felt so much pressure to shoot. I think it's terrible that school shootings and hate crimes are so prevalent, our minds naturally go toward them at the slightest provocation. I think that you couldn't possibly make this shit up, and if you do, you are disturbed.

With all that in mind, I read this amazing article today about trauma and environmental catastrophe.

There is so much good in the world.

Short-Winded and Sharp-Tongued

I've been writing a long time. My father sent me the scrap of paper above which I'll add to a little box full of poems and stories that I wrote long, long ago.

As the dreary news trickles in, my tongue smarts and the words to an old American song drift inside my brain.

Oh give me a home

As I wrote on a previous post, my arms aren't long enough to reach, always, with compassion toward everyone. Mea culpa. 

As my friend said in a text this morning, Trump is the whetstone where we sharpen our tongues. 

where the buffalo roam,

The picture of our President Resident Lech with six other white men standing round watching him sign legislation that tells women what we can't do with our BODIES

where the deer and the antelope play

Our President Resident Lech has given the go-ahead to fuck with sacred land and clean water, and we are being asked to reach out with compassion.

where seldom is heard a discouraging word

I don't think softened words are going to do much of anything.

and the skies are not cloudy all day.

Ecological Politics and Riprap

It's obviously human hubris to think we can destroy the planet, can destroy life. It's just another exaggeration of ourselves.

 A kind of bottom line is that all human activity is as trivial as anything else. We can humbly acknowledge that and excuse ourselves from exaggerating our importance, even as a threat, and also recognize the scale and the beauty of things. And then go to work. Don't imagine that we're doing ecological politics to save the world. We're doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It's a personal exercise in character and in manners. It's a matter of etiquette. It's a matter of living right. It's not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It's that we must do it because it's an aesthetic and ethical choice.

 Those issues are all real, but they're not total. And the power of the universe far surpasses any damage we can do to it.

Gary Snyder, Tricycle Magazine interview, adapted from Nobody Home: Writing, Buddhism and Living in Places, by Julia Martin and Gary Snyder 

If you're like me, you feel a rising panic about the state of the ecological world. You feel inadequate to the task and perhaps even complicit. You feel like your thoughts are free-floating and ineffectual. Your attempts to reduce your carbon footprint, to tread lightly, to support environmental causes seem paltry in the face of population explosions, oil-slicked animals along the coast, a contaminated food supply, and an over-medicated population whose urine and feces are laced with chemicals that are then flushed into the water and recycled, squirted from our breasts into babies' mouths and onward. That was a hellish sentence, no?

I read Gary Snyder's provocative words, excerpted above, and felt, if not comforted, then galvanized. I'd love to hear what you think of them -- even if you have no Buddhist leanings.

Here's a Gary Snyder poem -- one of my favorites:


Riprap

Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
               placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
               in space and time:
Solidityof bark, leaf, or wall
               riprap of things.
Cobble of milky way.
               straying planets.
These poems, people,
               lost  ponies with
Dragging saddles -
               and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like and endless
                four-dimensional
Game of Go.
                ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
                 a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
                 with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
                 all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.

Gary Snyder

Sustenance and Salvation

Greg Gray Cloud, being led away from Senate Chambers

Grandfather look at me, I am standing here struggling, 

I am defending Grandmother Earth and I am chasing peace.

Grey Cloud, 

translated from a Lakota unci maka wiwayang wacipi song

I'm not sure who is unmoved, always, by the plight of Native Americans in this country, -- both by their history and their present struggles -- but surely only those with cruel and hard natures. Yesterday's close vote against the Keystone XL pipeline was a relief to those of us who have even the tiniest bit of concern for our environment, and maybe a slap in the face to the oligarchs and plutocrats that hold all the power, and when I read the story of Greg Gray Cloud, arrested for unruly behavior in the Senate Chambers, I felt the tiniest bit of hope in what otherwise is my growing cynicism and disdain for anything pertaining to government and business in our country.  That even Elizabeth Warren (whom I deeply respect and admire) was a tad undone by his chanting gave me a thrill. That Gray Cloud was arrested with a court date in December gives me another one, to tell you the truth -- a diversion, perhaps from the grotesquerie that parades as democracy.

Here's the article and video.  Wica Agli is a group created to bring back traditional masculinity values and to eradicate violence against women and children.  And thanks to Rebecca for posting it!

This Bitter Earth

Oliver and I stood at the back door last night and looked up into the sky. Terrific winds have been raging all across California the last couple of days, and our backyard is littered with palm fronds and tree debris. The stars, though, shone brightly, despite our urban setting, and we both exclaimed how many there were and how bright. Maybe the wind has blown out the darkness and allowed the stars to shine through! I said.

No, Mom! Oliver said. Haven't you heard? Pollution is getting less and less here in Los Angeles and the stars are coming back! I heard it in the news!

I must have looked dubious, but Oliver insisted and said, again, We're getting more aware, Mom, of the planet! It's good!

And I felt so hopeful in that moment, that we have these young, bright minds, these stars, actually, still here, hoping and confident.

I later stumbled across this video on the On Being website, and thought it was perfect to end this post. That's the voice of the Dalai Lama and, later, Dinah Washington, singing This Bitter Earth. May both Oliver's hope and the short film bring YOU hope today!

Inauguration day and why I'm a tad jealous of my kids

When I was Henry's age, Jimmy Carter was trying, ineffectually, to bring our country out of the dark days of Watergate and all the lying and paranoia of the Nixon years as well as the lingering poison of the Vietnam War and the ripping social changes that occurred as a result. A few years later and still too early for my first presidential vote, Ronald Reagan was in charge. The only thing I can remember in high school was the day Reagan was shot, and by the time I was immersed in college and had found my people, those with broad and tolerant liberal ideals and traditions, Reagan's second term represented nothing but superficial cheer and jingoism. I understand now that Reagan was unable to utter the word AIDS until 1987, so huge was his discomfort over homosexuality, and one has to wonder if the epidemic had broken out in the "straight" world whether more might have been done to stem it and prevent the hundreds of thousands of deaths from the disease during his tenure and the millions afterward.

But then there's this:

Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law ... for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.

President Obama's Second Inaugural Address 

And there was also this:

We, the people, still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity.  We must make the hard choices to reduce the cost of health care and the size of our deficit.  But we reject the belief that America must choose between caring for the generation that built this country and investing in the generation that will build its future.  For we remember the lessons of our past, when twilight years were spent in poverty, and parents of a child with a disability had nowhere to turn.  We do not believe that in this country, freedom is reserved for the lucky, or happiness for the few. 

President Obama's Second Inaugural Address 

 and this:

We, the people, still believe that our obligations as Americans are not just to ourselves, but to all posterity.  We will respond to the threat of climate change, knowing that the failure to do so would betray our children and future generations.  ...  Some may still deny the overwhelming judgment of science, but none can avoid the devastating impact of raging fires and crippling drought and more powerful storms.The path towards sustainable energy sources will be long and sometimes difficult.  But America cannot resist this transition, we must lead it.  We cannot cede to other nations the technology that will power new jobs and new industries, we must claim its promise.  That’s how we will maintain our economic vitality and our national treasure -- our forests and waterways, our crop lands and snow-capped peaks.  That is how we will preserve our planet, commanded to our care by God.  That’s what will lend meaning to the creed our fathers once declared.

President Obama, Second Inaugural Address 

I remember wincing when Reagan spoke during his later years, and for the life of me I can't remember a single thing he said in an inaugural address.

Not so my sons Henry and Oliver, and the experience they are having as kids growing up during the Obama years. They are at once nonchalant about his race and the enormous gains that his presidency represents and enamored of his cool eloquence, his smile, and his beautiful children the exact same age as they. They know he supports the gay parents of their friends, and that his health plan will help families of children with disabilities like theirs. They know that he not only believes in global warming but that he is (however belatedly) pledging to do something about it.

We watched the inauguration all morning, and while my eyes teared up again and again, finally spilling over at the ringing words of his address, both Henry and Oliver took it in stride, enjoying the music and even the wonderful poem that the openly gay, Cuban-born and American-raised Richard Blanco read in a Billy Collins'-like incantatory tone:



You guys are so lucky and blessed to be coming of age during this time, I said to my boys, proudly. This  man is our President and he represents what is good about our country, what our country should be proud of  -- you're lucky that when you look back on your childhood, he will be the man that you remember as our country's leader.

You know, I realize the inauguration used far too much corporate money, and I've never been one to appreciate splendor or fawn over celebrity, but I do revel in the words, and I heard them as authentic and true and resolved. I can't pretend to know whether things will unfold as the President wishes them to, but I can hope they do, and I can sure as hell impress upon my children that the ideals spoken of yesterday are the right ones, the honorable ones, the ones that their father and I espouse and support.

Reader, what did you think of the President's address and if you are conservative and dislike the President, what did you tell your children?