I am Shirley-McLain-ian, to a degree.  I believe that I chose this life before I was born, and this spot on the planet to live it, and the people who were my family.  All these things I whine about, ...they've been happening forever, and probably will happen forever, and will happen whether I am here to gasp at the horror or not.

When one experiences an overwhelming trauma, I think a person tends to believe something like, "This horribleness is only happening here—it can't be like this everywhere."  Of course it is not horrible everywhere, but once a victim focuses solely on their own trauma, it is only a short step to seeing it as the only trauma. 

From the way I have lived my life you'd think that pain and suffering were my invention, that my surveillance of it is novel and unique, and that no one has ever noticed injustice before me.  I have to keep reminding myself: It is not all about me.  It never has been.

So what is the other response?  Tell me please.  Parts of the world containing millions of people are going to hell in a handbasket, and I skip merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals.  But what's the other response? ...the one that does not dwell so tenaciously on tragedy?

(Let's see if i can do this without 'dwelling tenaciously on the tragedy.') 

Focusing away from the point-at, gasping, horror may not be the same thing as denying it is there, but it feels that way to me.  Pretending everything is OK is charged for me, supercharged emotionally.  As you may know, when I was two years old, I experienced a horror that has not yet ended.  But that event in itself is not the point.  The thing that makes it difficult for me not to scream (figuratively), even when screaming has been done to an annoying excess (like I have done in this blog), is that the two year old's screams were deliberately ignored.  The choice was made to ignore what happened, to pretend everything was OK, because in 1961 nobody wanted to put my father's brother in a mental institution, which would have been the course at the time, and nobody knew how to handle the rape of a child; nobody even wanted to admit that it had happened. 

So it didn't.  My screams all drowned in the sea of denial around me.  And my reality rejected my experience.  My going-on-three-year-old life in Northboro, Massachusetts became stunningly and tragically unreal when parents, family, extended family, and even family friends, all rejected my experience as if my story were the problem, instead of the horror it was reporting.

So, the image of skipping merrily along like a girl in a Spring dress distributing depressing little vignettes as though they were flower petals, captures in some way the absurdity of my experiences—perhaps the absurdity of everyone's experiences. 

And screaming, ...well, I don't know when to stop because I have been taught to believe that I make no sound at all. 

I don't know where to start, this article tells of so many crimes and inhumanities.  Like rocketing and bulldozing homes while civilians still occupy them.  Like using prisoners as human shields.  Like extrajudicial executions and disposal of bodies in unmarked mass graves. 

Are the Israeli's allowed to do this because of the Holocaust?  We need to get over our gentile guilt.  I have only skimmed the surface of that genocide's horror, like lightly touching the numbers etched in glass, and even that was overwhelming.  But nothing justifies repeating that behavior.  Nothing.  I acknowledge the base urge of the Israeli people to return horrors and inhumanities for the horrors and inhumanities which have been inflicted on them.  But civilization, by definition, means that such atrocities are stopped, not perpetuated.  Sharon, in everything he has done his whole career, has sought to perpetuate the insanity of hatred.  Israel, stop him.

Where are the tears?  Where have our hearts and souls gone? 

Harper's Magazine: A Gaza Diary

Rendered evil?  Is that like rendered fat?  No, of course not, but it makes about as much sense. 

It has taken me some time to come to terms with my anger and disappointment with Isreal, but I am now an unapologetic critic of Isreali actions.  Israel is the one in this conflict that has rockets, jets, helicopters, bulldozers, tanks and an army.  Isreal is using her military assests to silence, terrorize and punish the Palestinian people not for suicide bombings but for dissenting—dissent which by any account is overwhelmingly justified.  If anything, the suicide bombers have played into Sharon's bloody hands, and he has encouraged them every step of the way.  I have observed nothing but contempt from the Israeli government toward the Palestinians, whose land they occupy.  No rational assessment can conclude from current Israeli actions that the Palestinian people have any hope for the future beyond complete submission without protest, and increased suffering beneath the heel of a boot—until they are exterminated.  Israel wants ALL the land.

If there is an evil here, it certainly does not spring from the heart of a child who blows herself up in desperation and rage.  Nor does it originate in the heart of a 23 year old boy who has faced the black hole of an Israeli gunbarrel—more often than not pointed by a soldier in a livid rage—every work day for a year.  I submit to you that evil is a quality of behavior, not an entity in itself, and the side whose behavior has had the most evil effect is not the side least powerful and most villified.  Israel must change, or suffer the consequences of harboring evil, which will not come in the form af a crushing military assault like the one being waged against the Palestinians.  The consequences to Israel-the-oppressor will be a godless rot from within its own soul.  I think it has begun.

What the hell is real?  And will it hurt me?  The answers, respectively, are nothing, and yes. 

What does it matter what's real, anyway?  I mean, it's either nothing, or everything.  Or nothing and everything.  It is a superfluous question.  Doesn't matter.  And hurt?—that's a subjective thing.  If I'm addicted to pain killers and suddenly stop taking them, then just being awake hurts.  If I have attained a modest enlightenment around the issue of pain and suffering, then my injuries, though they hurt, serve to expand me rather than diminish me.  In the latter case, hurt is a desirable thing.  In fact, at some point beyond the fear and panic it might otherwise cause, hurt becomes a gratifying gift, the mark of an attenuated sensitivity to conscious life.

These are practical questions for me.  I have not gotten beyond the fear and panic yet to whatever it is that we call 'real'—the true story of me playing itself out in my absence.  I'm missing it.  Though I am in this story, I am not present to it.  I get glimpses of the story of me when people, usually strangers and usually in response to my writing, make observations about me.  This is like catching a distorted reflection of myself in the chrome of a passing car.  To say the least, this is a rather eclectic and remote way of appreciating the art of my own story.  But it proves I have not vanished.  Not yet. 

I am addicted to unconsciousness.  No drugs for me, thank you.  They are not strong enough.  They just leave me groggy, but still connected.  What I want is to completely disconnect; what do the shrinks call it?—dissociate.  That's what does it for me.  In the tacky personal exposes, and in the Readers' Digest versions of life, dissociation is described as being pushed out of your own body and floating ghostlike above it, beside it—somewhere nearby—and watching like a spectator while this horror or that is being perpetrated upon you.  I described it once rather aptly (if I do say so myself) in this snippet:

...and that's just it, disconnecting hurts.  It's the only drawback.  Otherwise I could visit and observe life comfortably, like an oceanographer in a glass sphere, visiting a shipwreck.  Warm, dry, ...breathing.  As a tool for oceanography, this works.  As a tool for living life, it is an unweildy contraption requiring most of my effort just to cart it around.  It obstructs every touch and whisper, and it imposes upon anyone who would communicate with me the need make cryptic gestures in an impromptu sign language.  I am the boy in the bubble.  The only problem is that there is no goddamn reason for the bubble.  It's worthless.  It's useless.  And it is now causing more pain than it ever protected me from, once upon a time.  In panic now I cling to it, remembering how it saved me once.  But the quality of disconnecting, which was salvific decades ago, is rapidly becoming fatal today.

I can't wait to see what happens next.

And this from the book I am reading:

It has been a sad and depressing ...week, ...month, ...season?  Life?  I don't know, but I hope this darkness lifts.  And I am glad this man is in the same world as me, at the same time as me—if for no other reason than to reinforce a feeble hope I have that people are all that really matter; that connections between souls are indeed possible; and that the dirty, cheap, puny things we do to each other both personally and globally have not, yet, submerged us completely.

There may be hope.