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Embarrassment
What is your Response to Man's Inhumanity to Man?
Here's one answer -- one way to respond -- to the shadows of this world.
Posted January 9, 2010
Old men are like babies. With their boneless gums they're beggars for love and supplicants for life. The Fool tells Lear: "Thou shouldst not have been old till thou hadst been wise." I wish I could talk to that Fool. I would tell him that because the smarter you get the dumber you are it's not so easy to be wise. Maybe that's why he is what he is. The bum keeps warm with a dirty blanket. He's lying on the sidewalk. He's eating his dinner from the kind of Styrofoam box that might have come from a Chinese take-out and ended up in the trash before it ended up by his side. Some people are born again. They speak in tongues. They cast aside sin and then they sin again. Then they're born again. Hallelujah. It's like living on this land in 107 degree heat. It's hot by morning. By noon you're sweating. By 1:00 pm your only goal is to get through to the end of the day. Same with smack. Another day, another dose. You're trying to ease that horror of what Freud refers to as man's inhumanity to man. Shoot it. Snort it. Smoke it. Eat it. "Why do birds fly momma?" "To look pretty for us sweetie. Because the world was created for us. We're God's special people. Other people aren't like us. Remember that. Stay away from the dirty children who live like pigs in the streets. They have diseases." There's enough shame to blind a thousand eyes. The end of the day finds us dusty still on a mountain ridge. We had hoped for the river valley below. What to do? A few swallows of water from the little that's left. We touch each other gently, and then settle into our sleeping bags, hold hands and sleep. The next day we bushwhack down burnt steep slopes. We see a spot of green. We're drawn to it. Water emerges from charred earth. Why here? We sip from the spring with parched mouths and under a hot sun. We've been drawn to this spot as our ancestors a hundred thousand years ago were drawn to watering holes on the African savannah. By late afternoon, we climb down a rocky lip to the river. We swim unclothed in a wild pool, which cascades into another even larger and more brilliant. We call it Blue Pool. We could trade down to nothing. Nothing would be everything. We could walk long, walk high, walk higher, drop in, drop out, and make love in the sand with our only legacy being silhouettes into the night sky which only one of us at a time can see.
You want to know the Truth? My friend, Listen!
Create and love or die.