Listening to NPR the other day, it was bright and warm and we were parked beneath the sun across the street from the Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Charlotte, North Carolina, another empty RV park, this one with poorer showers but a nearby Coke machine, 60 cents for a can, somehow the quality of the bathing facility seemed a little less important. So. Mike and I were both inside the RV, occupying separate corners, doing our separate things—a little work, a little idle, but always through the use of some form of technology or other. The day was passing, with deliberation, punctuated by bird calls and the distant engine roars of practice laps, heated by sun and southern languor and with all deliberation, the day was passing. North Carolina, the United States. Another American day in another American year.
News, of course, that’s why I turned on NPR, mornings and evenings making me think of catching up with the world, or maybe it’s just a matter of passively segueing in to and out of the quieter hours. I sit and listen, do not move, and the world comes to me. And through the radio it seems to take more time, somehow it feels more like watching it stroll towards me on the horizon. It’s nicer this way, none of that visual abuse so often caterwauling out of the television, the clashing graphics so violent these days, Nancy Grace’s face. Nora Roberts, Ann Taylor, Cory Flintoff, your voices are like ribbons of chocolate falling, even you Lakshmi Singh, even you Terry Gross, both of you are still the opposite of FOX. Meaning, oddly enough, the perfect accompaniment to a quiet RV park day is not FOX, but NPR.
The sun beginning to gather its belongings, gesturing towards its door, the air still warm like breath, another American day in another American year.
It was either Nora Roberts or Ann Taylor who said it. A report from Baghdad, another bomb, another explosion, more death, more violence between strangers, a phrase she spoke into her studio microphone, “the wounded and the witnesses.” Look at it again, say it aloud to yourself: “the wounded and the witnesses.” Or try it like this:
“the wounded and the witnesses.”
The first thing to catch my ear, yes, the alliteration, but then the more I thought about it…. The alliteration, yes, at first, but then as I thought about it the meaning. First came the images, blood and flowing robes, hot sand swept by the dry air, exploding human violence in a Middle Eastern country. For some reason all the blood I saw was in spatters, not soaked, flung almost artfully across faces, faces contorted in pain, a loved one or maybe just the state of their country lying wounded and helpless in their arms. Tears, cries. Wails, the ringing of concussed ears. Sand still infusing into all that hot wind. The word ‘aftermath’ all over the background, people’s lives changed irrevocably, one rememberer at a time.
Then came the thought, damning: we are all witnesses. Then the thought that we were all just standing idly by, wanting to go about our own lives, we were on our way to market, we were studying at school, we were trying to earn a living, we were writing, we were reading—and then this. And then this war, and then the genocide in Rwanda, and then Abu Ghraib, and then Chechnya, and then the tsunami, and then a thousand dead Indians on a train, and then a hundred thousand Brazilians in a slum, and then Katrina, and then Darfur, and then the World Trade Center, and then the winter he never came home. We were doing something else. We were merely on our way. We were just trying to get by.
Innocent, we were, but condemned we have become. As long as we remain standing idly by, as long as we want only to go about our own lives, as long as keep traveling only to and from the market and never to Washington, and never in letters to elected officials, and never, having taken to the streets, to the square to join a protest or a parade, to speak out, either for our against. Innocent we once were until we first saw, or heard, until we first took it upon ourselves to find and know this world. We witnesses to the wounded, the wounded who pile up every day, and what do they have to show for this lived life, as they lie departing in our arms, as their blood streaks our faces, what do they have to show for it all, for their winnowed breathing? What reassurance do they have from us that this at least might not happen again? What reassurance do they have that, at the very least—at the embarrassing minimum—this won’t happen again tomorrow, that this death and intransigence won’t slip by unindicted even later that afternoon?
I know how much glass is in this house from which I throw stones. Even my fixtures are clear and brittle, even my mortar and nails. But. Or particularly—why is it all so complacent? Why does our society say that they care, but act like they don’t, why all the supporting of our troops with car magnets, but their denigration when it comes time to vote, when we kept in office those who would put them, without enough armaments and with lower salaries than the private sector mercenaries, into harm’s way? Why do we young, we educated, we energetic, why do we who have been followed by such incessantly smiling fortune—why do we who should, and worst of all do know better—how is it that we go about our lives, having witnessed, holding close and not flinging far this testimony? Are we really so fat and is the hog really so high? Is there really that much soma in the air? Are the iPods too often in our ears, is the internet almost always on in front of us, are we really that busy writing emails, and buying drinks, do we not recognize the wounded in our arms, the criminals who have put them there? Are we really so safe and opiated that we have not even spoken out once?
Are those bastards really so untouchable? Is it really so easy for them to ruin the world? Is it really just a matter of crafting highly pixelated distractions?
No comments:
Post a Comment