My birthday was the usual non-event. I don’t really pay attention to it myself and try to avoid the subject with my friends until after the fact because the pampering and attention feels bizarre. I even made the mistake of inviting a friend to sleep over the previous night, hoping that he wouldn’t notice my birthday. Of course, I forgot about Facebook’s notifications and his first words in the morning were “Hey, Happy Birthday man!” Curse you Zuckerberg. So, after hanging out with various friends and tunneling my way through a stack of barbecued ribs, I retired and did my usual geeky thing. A couple of days later I met up with my friend Billy, the only other American who had attended Ellesmere during my gap year in England. He’d finished his exams, graduated the school, and, wouldn’t you know it?, still lived near Boston! We met to go bouldering, which is a fancy way of saying indoor rock climbing without a harness and often climbing with your back parallel with the impact mat on the floor only fifteen feet below.
He too asked me the question. “So, dude, what does it feel like to be twenty?”
Of course he asked this while I was dangling from an overhang and swinging my body to try to get my legs back up to something I could press them into. Okay, “swinging” makes it sound more dignified than the flopping fishy movements I was making before I dropped flat on my back with a yelp.
Billy nodded. “So that’s what a twenty year-old is like. Majestic.”
I lay my head back and laughed as I tried to get my fingers to close into fists. My forearms probably didn’t have enough strength to let me hold my kitten by the time we left. He was way more experienced and his arms were sore too. At least my hands weren’t covered in blisters like his were.
When I finally got home that night all I wanted was to sleep. I then realized that I’d only had a couple cups of yogurt to eat that day. Normally I would take full advantage of my voracious appetite’s absence and head to bed. Instead I decided to nourish myself out of respect to my body once I showered. As the hot water washed away some of my fatigue and weariness, I noticed that I felt kind of chilly, even though the bathroom could have doubled as a sauna from the hot water. I wrapped myself in a robe and by the time I was done with half a rack of leftover ribs I was ready to puke.
I wore a sweatshirt to bed and used my bathrobe and an extra blanket as additional insulation when I noticed that my shivering wasn’t stopping. Long story short, chills, aches, and the nightmares that have been plaguing me every night for the last few weeks made for a fun evening. The next day I got a call from my Nana and I got the same question again. When another sharp pain had passed and I finished my impression of a Picasso portrait, I told her much the same as I’ve told you. So far, being twenty feels like being at sea. I couldn’t even think straight for most of Friday, so writing of any kind was out of the agenda.
Miraculously I felt better again for the most part by nightfall and the next day I was goofing around outdoors again. However my appetite has not entirely returned and if I take so much as one bite over my limit I’m likely to hurl again. I’ve made sure to treat toilets, sinks, and other such receptacles with increased deference to keep relations friendly just in case I need to give them a very sudden and personal hug.
Of course the nausea wasn’t helped much by the South Carolina shooting a few days ago. I’d love to see the right wing try to claim that racism isn’t an issue anymore after that massacre. Even John Stewart couldn’t bring himself to make any sort of joke to help people cope via gallows humor. He made a good point during that episode and now I’m wondering what the point is of going after ISIS or anyone else overseas when we are doing this sort of damage to ourselves. Are we bombing them in case they decide to attack if there happens to be anything left of us when we’re done over here? Good job doing the terrorists’ work for them, people. Good job.
As if I wasn’t confused enough with my own career choices and disgusted already with much of American culture, this last bit has reminded me to seriously reconsider moving to England for good. As if the avaricious political agendas, ignorance promoting cultural figures, and some peoples’ asinine obsession with political correctness wasn’t enough, racism is the cherry-bomb on top of the gunpowder sundae. Even if I wasn’t sick my stomach would still be doing flips.
The thing is that I can’t think of a thing we can do to remedy the situation aside from improving our education system and preventing racist or religious legislation from being implemented until people start cluing into the fact that black people deserve the same respect that every other human being deserves. While punitive laws like forcing the south to remove its Confederate flags and renaming its racially-biased streets would give the country a political and physical face-lift, it would also provoke retaliation and resentment. On the other hand, trying to be patient seems to be rewarded with more deaths like those we saw in Charleston on Wednesday. Gun control won’t fix the issue. Even if it lowers the body count some, fanatics will still find ways to kill people.
During the shooter’s hearing, the family members of the deceased said through their tears and bitterness that they forgave the boy who killed their loved ones. Normally I would use their example as a shining beacon of what we need to practice to heal divisive relations. However, while forgiveness and understanding work between two wronged parties such as in a war, I doubt its efficacy in the face of maniacs. Victims on both sides of a war will feel rage because they have lost their homes or their fathers or their pride. Forgiveness and the understanding brought by an effort to learn about the other side’s perspective works in those situations because war is often brought about by rational, albeit morally questionable reasons. The rage can be assuaged because both sides can come to empathize and lay aside their swords so that no one else has to suffer a dead father or a burned home.
Zealots don’t have that capacity. They are uncompromising, unrepentant, and desire to inflict misery to sate their own irrational obsessions. They might disguise the effort to others or even to themselves as a reaction to some imagined sleight. At their core, though, they understand that they hate a people not for what they have done, but for who they are. They dehumanize their enemy and for them it becomes an issue of “what” those of the enemy are. They do not even consider their targets worthy of compassion or reason or anything more than what a beast would get from a hunter or zoo keeper.
I want to believe that the remarkable forbearance shown by the members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is the most effective way of handling the larger issue. I think that it is the right way of handling it, but I do not think that it is the best way or that it will even work. I fear that this display of mountainous generosity might only be perceived by the fanatics as weakness.
So, to answer the million dollar question of the week “What does it feel like to be twenty years old?,” it feels like I’ve been brought into a world with a lot of potential and beauty in it and it feels like a lot of people are using that potential to burn and mar the beauty.
Song of the Week: An old one, but a good one.
No comments:
Post a Comment