In the last several days, death-dealing mounds of mud have slid through the lives of the poorest Guatemalans. Shifting plates beneath Pakistan have deemed thousands either dead or desperate. Young people of all sorts have been slain without dignity in the deep chaos of a bad war gone worse. And our own President has asked Congress to prepare the nation and its laws for an avian flu pandemic.
I opened my eyes to this shipwrecked state of affairs for no more than five minutes over the weekend. With my distraction standing close by, I read the headlines aloud. “It’s as if the world is ending,” she said, as we made fearful connections with our eyes. I thought of the world catching fire in the chaos, and growing finally too fast for the little men in hats to stop the growing blaze.
Minutes later, I encountered an increasingly familiar thought. I didn’t care about the Guatemalans, the Pakistanis, or the unfortunate souls already fighting the avian flu. I’ve never been to the cities that were destroyed, the tragedies named aren’t mine, and I can’t touch them. We want to care, and most of us call that caring. The donations and prayers, helpful as they may be, are for us.
In the last several days, my five-year-old darling of a nephew broke his arm in two places. He’s the eldest child to a mother of three, who is left with a husband out of town, and a cold that has now touched each member of her family. When she isn’t holding her infant, treating her daughter’s sickness, or being the hands of her son, she’s teaching high-school seniors with infantile attitudes how to read and write. And though she’s a fine teacher, this semester is her first. While these small struggles enveloped these little lives, I watched a fellow graduate student realize she isn’t happy where she is, saw an old friend cry, ignored a beggar, and fell in love with someone that cannot be near me.
The truth is, we don’t have the technology yet. Death tolls and satellite images aside, we have no way of measuring tragedy accurately. If we did, the morning paper might read 11 Million Hearts Break Over Holiday Weekend, or 3,500 Stretched and Stressed Mothers Watching Sons Learn To Stop Sucking Thumb. If such a widespread understanding was available, we might be able to acknowledge that the world caught fire long ago.
But we have no way of detailing and describing the awful bit of life that happens every day, between the headlines. So we bring out the bold type for the occasional tragedies that we can get our minds around, as one. Yes, death is awful, and visible destruction makes such death easy to describe and cry for. But if we should ignore the path of destruction from the invisible trials one must endure if he or she is left alive, we’d be ignoring the hottest, most gruesome flames.
I want them to rebuild New Orleans, to clear the mud in Guatemala, and to find a way to vaccinate the underclass that risks contracting a flu of biblical proportions. But if it were simply a matter of easy science and funding, I’d ask that they first develop the proper drugs to prevent my grandfather from forgetting my father’s name. I’d ask that instead of building homes on a flood plane, they’d instead make us true to one another, or incapable of arson. I’d ask that they rehaul social security so that every American had a dad, and a good one. But science simply isn’t there yet, and it never will be. So, with these true cares, I must instead ask someone else, while I act like I care about stories that don’t involve selfish broken me or the people I already love.