Notes from a

Non-Participant in

The Front Lines of Ignorance

 

I woke up slowly around noon on September the 11th and still lying in bed I called a mail order company to see what had happened to something I had ordered more than two weeks ago. They put me on hold to check my order and had me listen to the broadcast of their choice. It happened to be the afternoon news bringing searing images of something about terrorists and people jumping out of the windows of burning buildings forcibly into my mind. A sudden force of emotion rushed through me. I threw the phone down in an involuntary reflex of rage and kept it at a fairly inaudible distance till the lady returned and I finished my business. Next I called the phone company to check on my bill and heard a recording saying that they were closed due to a national emergency.

 

My sudden rage was directed at a different form of creeping terrorism that feels even closer to home and is growing steadily. It has been gradually breaking through to me that something is very wrong with our lives, that they have become suffocating, psychotic, and preposterous with priorities imposed from outside which are rushing at us in a swelling tide of inescapable information. We are full to overflowing, either from others' agendas masquerading as ours, or from the surplus of random misfortune that deserves our attention. There is a metastasized tumor of ‘attention deficit disorder’ from having too much to attend to that limits our ability to focus our feelings, to simply assign meaning to information.

What 30 years ago were small, unnoticed erosions into my sense of control over my life has turned into an avalanche. I only have to be on the freeway of any modern city or stand in the middle of any mall to feel the shifting of those internal tectonic plates that stabilize the sandcastle of the personality, to feel that fragile sense of ownership at the center of my ‘self’ either overwhelmed and swept away by the massive undertow of so many other urgent rushing lives, or simply lost in an exploding world whose numbing numbers have become a brutal arena of billions of competing agendas, and where the sensory invasion of inescapable, relentless information is continually competing to reshape the territory of my perceptions with its own, threatening the very borders of the self and obscuring our ability to even recognize our own experience.

 

Our challenge is becoming how to take our own life seriously, how to value our own joy and pain when they can be seemingly dwarfed or surpassed by just looking in any direction or picking up any newspaper. How can we dare to assign any real importance to what happens to us, to our emotional lives? Perhaps mainly by insisting and by knowing that not valuing your own experience devalues everyone’s.

 I felt a sharp desire to be clearer about my perceptions and experiences as if they contained a kind of hidden sanctuary. It seemed to me a good and irresistible thing to explore the company of the ‘self’ from any angle that was available, to find out if I was the major stockholder. After a life of being self involved I discovered I wasn’t involved with my ‘self’ enough. I wanted to reclaim that self that is here so ‘it’ can ‘really’ be here, for its own sacred purpose and not someone else’s, to wrestle back ownership of that precious place we call consciousness.

 

Now this tireless messenger, who usually has the emotional presence of a disinterested third party, is bringing me another message of pain and grief, another version of Cortez and his un-merry men slaughtering more Aztecs and a place inside me just wants to scream, God Damn it, Enough, Stop it! The Aztecs shed the blood of their citizens to their God and our God sheds the blood of his Son – and we have more or less followed suit ever since. Why can’t our human high priests and inhumane high Gods tell the difference between pain and pleasure, harm and healing ?

 

 I have begun to realize that my sense of well being and the measure of my happiness depend on the ratio of positive to negative feelings in my life and there has been an increasing jeopardy in that balance for some time from simply being unavoidably exposed to the terrors and horrors of brutal economics, poverty, wars, random murders and muggings, of all the forms of hopelessness and despair that our civilized cruelty can produce.

How much of the suffering going on in the world which the media loudspeakers insist on delivering to us can be taken in at any moment without short-circuiting? The real mystery and miracle is where the evening ‘News-Anchor’ gets his psychotic calm from, or how anyone can be in the world without a mood disorder or some other significant form of mental illness. I realized that I do not want to ask ‘for whom the bell tolls’ for the ‘world at large’ anymore. I have become unable to. I don’t even want to hear it ringing. It has run ‘amok,’ out of control, tolling the same continuous message of grief and misery that never stops ringing and it’s taking too great a toll on my nervous system.

 

I did not know who had committed the act or what the nature or scope of the act was, or what their motivations were for doing it, but it suddenly seemed to me while lying there in my bed, that they had released a loud scream that had been silently residing and growing both within me and within the world, a mixture of frustration, anger, and rage that had finally become articulated into visible tragedy.

 

The first uncensored feeling to rise up in me was, ‘Maybe, at last, everyone’s in the same boat. Maybe we can finally get America’s attention off the stock market (that Frankenstein creation which doesn’t cope with ‘uncertainty’ any better than its creator) and ‘business’ as usual, and onto human agendas? Growing up I had been sickened at election after election watching us turn our backs with cynical or callous indifference toward the endless combinations of ‘have nots’ in this country from the homeless to the elderly. It was simply obscene to watch women and men and children push their shopping cart houses through the public sector and the private sector without raising a decibel of protest or public outrage, a sick picture of emergency and indifference, urgency and silence. To live without adequate income is to exist in a continual running emergency but the competing messages from our culture are ‘I do not see nor want to see it’ or ‘I see it but it is not relevant to our social agenda.'

While I was lying there wrestling with curiosity and the urge to turn on the TV and contend with the spin cycle of emotions that I knew would range from the ambivalent joy of my own safety to the unavoidable terror of others pain, I found myself suddenly interested in the space I was occupying, its feeling. There was a kind of kiddy lightness in this novel ignorance, an almost illicit sweetness that seemed to carry within it new possibilities about aspects of reality ordinarily denied to us.

What I didn’t know suddenly seemed as important as what I did know, just as negative numbers have a function in math. I felt as though I had discovered access to a secret form of occult happiness that hovered in those dim borders at the far edge of imagination’s yearning, teasing me like a ghost wind. I found myself listening to the voice inside, growing louder and more insistent, that said ‘Disconnect, just disconnect’ like an offering of some mysterious but important opportunity, a novel form of learning, a chance to see, think, and discover life from an inside track that was outside. I decided to continue my quarantine of ‘current events.’ I began to feel like a spy in reverse, carrying a silent important message, a secret without substance or content.

 

On the third day, while I was taking my daily walk, someone stopped me in his car for directions, asking me if he was heading west. It surprised me somewhat when I had to tell him that I didn’t know. After he drove off it occurred to me that the only west I knew was what was west of me, where my west was, and as I turned, so did it. I felt suddenly thrilled that the universe had placed a private little subversion inside of me, my own unique center in the natural order of things.

I slowly began to realize how tissue thin the mind’s autonomy really is, how a painful image from a news report or conversation would remain with me for days replaying itself again and again. I saw how often we were pushed, pulled, and directed by remote control. No wonder that I so often felt like a plastic, inflatable, reusable, all purpose human being. Our mind is continuously being subtly raped, unconsciously and forcibly violated by the seeds of other people’s thoughts, ideas, experiences, music, and random conversations, by an endless variety of external social pressures which subtly and not so subtly, shape our thought. I remembered back to my childhood years as a church acolyte when they told me things about a God and a Jesus I could not know they could not know. What a rare and precious thing it is, and how hard won, just to know ‘what happened when you left your room and how it really felt.’ If you don’t maintain a primary allegiance to that you have no real place to stand.

For example, I have been watching sports all my life waiting to see something happen just once, one real miracle. I wasn’t waiting for the last place team to upset the first place one, the weak hitter to hit the home run with bases loaded, I was waiting for that player who would suddenly turn and put the ball in the opponent’s basket, who would say, ‘what the hell we’re forty points ahead,’ or just ‘why not!’ I went through the library’s entire history of sports journals, newspapers, and biographies, even Ripley’s ‘Believe it Or Not’ and there wasn’t a mention of anything even remotely suggestive of such a miracle.

I haven’t seen this miracle for the same reason you don’t see people in the bowling alley trying to leave as many pins standing as possible. In many ways it would be a more challenging game, requiring more refined dexterity, but they aren’t aware that tradition and unconscious consent have programmed them to try and knock them down. It’s literally ‘unthinkable’ to do otherwise, partly because you never feel the chain collar around your neck till you move away from the stake. The only way you’re taught to play the game is to win or lose. No wayward, spontaneous, playful impulse ever whispers sweet nothings in your soul’s ear, the recess bell never rings.

We are surrounded by powerful pressures interested in promoting and preserving their agendas. They have large signs which, both intentionally and unintentionally, tell us which way to go and what to do when we get there. They would rather ‘your’ life not be the focus of your life. These pressures, whether commercial, economic, political, moral, or religious, want you to substitute appropriate response for authentic response, to ‘get on with your life’ by leaving it behind, to simply fit into the world as it is like a carrot or head of lettuce or a chair. The irony is that while they want and insist on your undivided attention, the only way to get theirs is by an act of profound inappropriateness, like shopping naked at Safeway, or the more terrifying acts of Sept 11. The fact that we share a common language, geography, biology, and traditions can lead us to the easy misconception that we share identical experiences. We all have our own private map of what makes us feel sad or happy, nervous or relaxed, excited or bored, along with our own private ‘treasure chest’ of fantasies. They are our ‘true north’ and if we lose touch with them it is not a small loss which is why one’s authentic experience is so crucial and often so threatening to others and why the continual struggle to be the author of our own experience is so vital. ‘Author’ means authority, authorizing your own response to your own experience, becoming your own Pope, Judge, Mailman, News-anchor, or President. Exactly where was this ‘I’ located and what were its dimensions? Just what is the circumference of the ‘self’ and what are its boundaries and how far do they extend? Could they be made to extend? And who says?

 

I established a fairly easy routine of being able to avoid exposure to anything relating to ‘it’ and went about my way with less vigilance but I couldn’t help noticing the flood of American flags that suddenly appeared almost everywhere and seemed to carry a feeling of a kind of ‘congratulations’ issuing from an inner circle of easy membership yet they also seemed to be also masking a deeper public display of a social ‘white cell’ syndrome, our social minds antibody activity finally sanctioned, released and amplified in a safe atmosphere that assured unanimous approval.

I found myself strangely wondering if that fugitive but powerful presence, the Berlin Wall of ‘Country’ was beginning to crumble, the fiction of ‘Nation’ giving way to deeper facts, threatening our need for something stable and permanent in our lives, an illusion of safe refuge. I think that’s why I found myself suddenly listening seriously to that voice that said, ‘Disconnect.’

 I saw a red convertible pull up along a sidewalk to park flying a large American flag like an erection. Two young men safe in their prime years under 30 jumped out and onto the street. They looked buoyant and comfortably self-assured and moved about with what seemed an unexamined level of high self-esteem. They got out wearing tee shirts that said in large bold letters, “Solidarity against Terrorism.” Something about it seemed odd and a little absurd, as if in answer to others, somewhere, who were wearing tee-shirts saying, “Solidarity for Terrorism or Gang Rape.” I sensed that a terrifyingly complex human tragedy was being reduced to a cultural, communal, bumper sticker.

Since this began I have found myself reflecting on my feelings about my country with a sharper focus in a way I hadn’t before. What did I really feel about living in America? I found myself thinking more about feeling, because, in the last analysis, we don’t think, we feel. It’s the only radar or compass that can give us our most vital bearings.

I was born and raised in America and have never been outside it, even during my four years in the Air Force which I spent in Kansas, so I have no basis for comparison but I am still able to respond to my existing environment and its effect on me. While I like the material comforts, I realized that my deeper response to it has been largely one of distaste. In a very real sense the environment as a whole has always felt like it was dominated by something coercive and unfriendly, like the bully on the playground that for the most part lacked any real sympathetic regard or sensitivity for anything or anyone outside its primary agendas of business, profit, competition, conformity and its stern, judgmental God. America has always really felt like a big football game to me, with harsh referees, an intimidating, suffocating super bowl that only has room only for winners and losers.

I realized I did not feel proud or possessive about my country, that I did not live in a ‘Country’ that I wanted to be mine, but in a fiercely competitive landscape that generates tension, conflict, and anxiety, as efficiently as if it had been designed for it. It is not a loving, caring, nurturing place, but a competing, judging, punishing, executing one where most of the time I feel as if I’m behind enemy lines. Its power is real and thoughtless and frightening. America is in a hurry. It is a ‘business warrior’ and its response to those who can’t keep up is the small, inconspicuous plastic containers for donations at supermarket checkout counters.

I spent four years in the Air Force marching in Rome’s legions when I was too young to know who I was or why I was there. Now I’m on disability and my teeth are falling out and when I called the Veterans Dept. to see where I could get them attended to they said I couldn’t. It wasn’t part of the plan. If, between wars, any young soldier were to go to a nearby phone booth and call this Veterans Dept. and inquire if he and his ‘sacred’ family would be unconditionally guaranteed health care in the future, following his service years, he would be told what I was when I asked the Veterans Hospital the same question, “No, only if there is a bed available and there seldom is, otherwise you’ll be sent to another Hospital where you will be responsible for your own bill.”

My deep feelings about my country, any country with such a ‘plan’ are Anger! I want the bully in America attacked, blockaded, suspended from school. Unfortunately ‘anger’ has become suspect in our age of ‘Therapy.’ There is much counseling on how to dampen anger, how to disarm it, detour it, ignore it, talk it away, reason it away, educate it away, meditate it away, pray it away, love it away, and gene-therapy it away, anything but how to listen to it.

 

I have found myself wondering what America’s soul is about? A week before the ‘event’ I watched a national evening ‘news-anchor’ report that there were ‘6000 homeless teenagers in Seattle’ without changing his expression. This is especially alarming when you realize that children are continuously absorbing messages from the world around them, from which they take their cues and direction, and one doesn’t have to look very far to see that the strongest messages coming at them are deeply disturbing: three times as many children are committing suicide now as compared to twenty years ago. People are living in shopping carts and tents, executions are challenging football as the national pastime and they only have to compete for our attention with the business community’s race to seduce and manipulate consumers, or the national ‘Jeopardy’ game of Wall Street roulette and other corporate carnivores. These children see a ‘Justice’ system whose main focus is building more and bigger prisons and a medical system that is not organized to simply deliver health care, but rather a confused nervous system that can’t decide if it wants to check the blood pressure in bed 5 or the day's receipts. What is wrong with this picture!

 

I recently organized an event of children who were reading poetry that they had written and a nine-year-old boy named Wes Bently read his two-line poem, ‘The Empire’:

Ask the repetitive Empire for food.

It will answer “no.”

 

I can only draw conclusions about a country’s values from the actions of its institutions and they tell me that health care, food, and shelter are not a priority, that they will be denied if we do not have a sufficient number of green pieces of paper. This is the message the children are absorbing. This is the fact and the evidence, this is what America wants them to swear allegiance to, want God to ‘Bless’ – an America that is handed back and forth between family dynasties, from ‘Roosevelt’s’ to ‘Kennedy’s’ to the ‘Bush’s’ like it was some kind of ‘Bonanza’ ranch that Ben Cartwright was going to pass on to Hoss and then Little Joe. A ‘Gunfight at the O.K. Corral,’ a center of sudden death business transactions, a ranch that is really a center of sudden death transactions, A business ‘Gunfight at the O. K. Corral.’ It is not Okay.

What has really happened here? Literally not knowing I would like to compound my ignorance by hazarding a guess. The famous attorney, Clarence Darrow, said his job was to ‘comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ Well, the comfortable have been afflicted. We have been attacked, I presume, by some members of a neighboring tribe, whose serious God did not like our serious God partially because our God was richer, stronger, and more powerful. Someone said accurately that, “we can only be as savage as we are absolutely serious.”

As I walk about or drive I see flags flowing in profusion from the private and public sectors, decorating sorrow’s random parade, and I sense a tide of anger and fear rising, looking for direction, release. The anger and fear are not new, they have been here surrounding us for some time but they have been disorganized and powerless. Now they have taken shape like a newly formed team with bright uniforms that has just found a worthy and needed challenge. But all this begs the question- Was everything OK the day before this happened? Where was our attention directed the day before, besides Wall Street? What was our anger directed to, besides the few remaining ‘Welfare’ recipients?

The headlines say, ‘America Attacked,’ and flags are flown at half-mast for those who perished, as they should be. Still, I find it necessary to separate people who die in any country from that country, to eliminate connections that are not deeply central to the powerful event of death, or at least make them peripheral. A songwriter recently wrote, “someone’s dying in Canada, and the leaves are drenched with rain.” What’s important is the dying and its echo of leaves drenched in rain, not Canada.

The most valuable thing about an American, or anyone of any country, is really that he or she is a living human being...... and I can’t help feeling...shouldn’t our primary allegiance be to the heart’s flag before that which the accidents of geography have thrust upon us. Shouldn’t flags everywhere be flown at half mast everyday for those everywhere who perish from less overtly violent, less deliberate, acts of commission or omission that range from exposure, homelessness, malnutrition and hunger, uncovered illness, to the infinite, invisible effects of poverty, which are an undeniable result of every Democracy, every Government, everywhere, giving tragic testimony to James Baldwin’s observation, – “we have not yet found social or political or religious systems to meet human needs.”

I happened to learn recently that the President said, “You are for us or against us.” The President needs a lens adjustment. The actual overlooked enemy is within, it is the agenda of our social priorities which continue to foster a wholly uncaring competitive atmosphere amidst a viral epidemic of toxic, unrealistic self reliance in which, ironically, it is the very struggle to survive that is killing us. It is something in our very own Country that is against us, a Country in which, tellingly, the person who occupies the presidency is increasingly felt to be little more than the head C.E.O. of a large corporation that doesn’t offer benefits.

And terrorism. What about terror? Where does it live? I can experience terror even in dreams or delirium but I can’t experience it if I’m unconscious. Terror resides in forms of consciousness and arises when we are exposed to either subtle or startling threats to vital areas of our well-being that we can’t respond to adequately or prevent, to what we can’t control.

It is not only what happens to us but also what seems likely to happen, whether it’s loss of a source of income, job loss, poverty’s landscape of chronic inadequate income or no income, homelessness – the mind and body’s absence of shelter and privacy, repeated frustration or blocked access to needed health care; the recurring cancer of worry in facing ‘problems without solution,’--- “ I can’t pay the rent,” “The letter says they’re going to shut the heat and water off,” “They said we aren’t covered,” “Regret to inform us we don’t qualify.” Are not all the mental and emotional states of pressure, stress, and hopelessness, both acute and chronic, that those conditions produce a kind of drip torture form of terror?! To be in need in this country is to exist in a state of shame behind enemy lines.

Then what about ‘rage.’ Can’t most anger, violence, and rage be ultimately traced back to a deep sense of powerlessness, loss, or humiliation in some form or another, aren’t they all loud, searing messages of pain or wounds that have gone unacknowledged, damaged lives that have not been really seen or sufficiently cared about. Violence is nearly always a response to an intolerable situation, to love that has been denied in some material or spiritual form. It is love denied but not silenced. While violence and rage and anger is not the voice of love that we have been taught to recognize, it is often, love speaking, loudly, trying to tell us about its profound, intolerable disappointment.

 

 

“Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,

the rocket’s red glare, the bomb’s bursting in air,

that gave proof through the night that the poor,

the homeless, the hungry, and the uninsured

were still there.”