Keep your empathy electric ... and blood off your prayer shawl.
~~~
A note about the photo: Volunteers from the ultra-Orthodox Zaka rescue organization hold up a victim's bloody prayer shawl in the library of the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva March 6, 2008 in Jerusalem. Eight Jewish students were killed and nine more wounded when a Palestinian gunman infiltrated the seminary and opened fire before he was shot dead by armed students. (Photo by Avi Ohayon/GPO via Getty Images)
So quickly the blog has shifted. Our sadness is tidal. So quickly, the levees can’t withstand our dwindling faith in the system, any system - and now we’re standing on the roofs of our houses looking to the government like “what’s next?!”
Or maybe I am a sucker for a hyperbolic metaphor?
In any event, the Fateful Hand of Being Crapped On is not very choosey these days.
When silver-spooned descendent of French royalty and fund manager René-Thierry Magon de la Villehuchet takes a boxcutter to his wrists in his comfy New York office and positions himself strategically so that he bleeds out directly into a trash can, what have we missed? After dismissing the janitors early that night, to keep from making even more of a mess of innocent people’s lives, he's worried about the carpet cleaners and placing undue stress on even more people?
If I’m a rich guy with homes, businesses, estates, families and friends in both France and New York, and I still feel hopeless when I realize I’ve been duped, what’s really missing? What’s really making me want to kill myself?
It’s not the economy. Only. It’s not the angry clients that he’s indebted to. Only. It’s something more systemic. It’s something so seemingly unanswerable that a 60-something year old, white-collared French man sees the rough-edged end of a boxcutter as his best way out.
What could be so horrible that 60 years does not provide enough perspective?
. . .
There’s more self-deaded in America.
NPR and CNN got the press release over the wires this week that our soldiers are popping themselves off at a quicker clip. And that’s the reported ones. That’s not accounting for the countless men, boys, women, daughters that perhaps devise a more honorable Killed In Action scenario for ending their lives. Instead of inflicting their spouses and parents with a relentless horror stuck in their brains, they leave them with an Arlington burial and medal.
In 2008, 128 soldiers are reported to have taken their lives. This amount is higher than that of the whole of civilian America. Army’s score: 20.2 suicided per 100,000. Civilian America: 19.5 suicided per 100,000. I’m no mathematician – but I’m thinking the Army’s looking at some faster-moving percentages than us regular folks looking down the barrel of a gun off-the-clock.
So The Army, a.k.a. The Government is introducing some suicide prevention tactics. Because we Americans don’t conduct suicide missions. We Americans are not terrorists. No no, that’s the other guys. No no, we keep our suicides personal, not ideological. No no, seriously. That's the other guys.
Battlemind. It’s called Battlemind - the program that’s the prescription to save its soldiers from themselves in response to low recruitment numbers.
How about this? GetOuttaThere. That’s another program I’ve heard of that might stop the hemorrhaging of good men being pushed too far.
. . .
Then there’s always someone being born to fill the hole of another loss. At the same time, someone’s putting a gun to their head or swallowing Drano, someone else in America is quietly financing the cloning their previous dog.
Go ahead, judge them. We’re all judging them. The only one not judging them is Leona Helmsley because she’s hoping the millionaire dog that survived her will sign off on having her cloned so that she can come back and continue being a bitch.
When Al Roker asks why she sold her jewelry to clone a dog at the price tag of $150K, Nina Otto so articulately states with glassy-eyed conviction, “Ummm, you know, I can always have jewelry. I actually can always have jewelry if I wanted it. I wanted him, if it was going to be … to be part of something … that I gave to make him happen.”
Ah. I see now. … no, no, no, I don’t.
While she's stroking her furry petri-dish fantasy of love and devotion, this guy and his wife get laid off from his tech job with Kaiser Permenente in Southern California –
- so all the family has to die.
His two sets of twins, a daughter and a wife. And himself.
“Is there no hope for a widow’s son?” said the fatherless son in his suicide note. All those children were not enough to pad the gap between father and son. He fell in and took everyone with him.
Kaiser Permenente should not be implicated. Poor Kaiser Permenente – they’re just trying to break records delivering ethically implicated births to full term. They’re just trying to be a health care organization in America. “Don’t blame the economy [for familicide],” says forensic psychologist Louis Schlesinger, professor of forensic psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Poor Kaiser Permenente - just providing healthcare to good hard-working families. (just not jobs)
Meanwhile, Kaiser Permenante holds a press conference about the single mother who gave birth to a much-maligned EIGHT MORE BABIES after a prior litter of 6.
How deep is the hole in her heart that she has to feed it with infertility drugs and death-defying pregnancies? And with no mention of a father or husband or lover, no less. How desperate is Kaiser Permenente’s board of trustees to steal ahead in the race to control nature to take on this single mother’s request for more more more more more more? How did any doctor look this woman in the face and let her lay down on the table and pump her full of too many children that, I DON'T KNOW, she may be too emotionally needy to raise? Did any doctor consult with his own set of ethics and personal empathy? ANY?
While this woman breeds like spiders with anti-divine intervention, Kaiser Permenente’s doctors and nurses pose for the perfunctory self-congratulatory press photos. (The hospital presumably took this themselves to hand out to the press – there’s no photographer listed.)
So while a dog is cloned and a herd of children circles up, a soldier, a father and a financier find themselves at the end of their rope.
What’s that phrase – when God closes a door, he opens a window?
Yeh, a window to jump out of.
Keep your ears open and your empathy electric. If you’re worried about things this year, there’s someone around you that’s already bought the farm and has convinced him or herself that no one’s going to miss them when they’re gone.
Keep your empathy electric. We need you awake. This is not a M. Night Shyamalan script we're in.
This is a trend. Killing yourself has become the new black.
And there’s nothing standing in its way besides our yet-to-be-found ability to cling to each other – all 750,000 of us standing in line at the Unemployment Office.
"Hi, I'm from Starbucks." "Citibank, here." "Lehman Bros., yo." "Over here, AIG and Starbucks - yeh, I lost them both at the same time." "Ford." "Hey, yo, I'm here from a Long Island City dealership, c'mere, man, shake my hand!" "Yo, I was laid off from a small business you never heard of." "Red Lobster - my boss just got all nervous for no reason and got rid of 6 of us today. We were freaking slammed yesterday and now today, he lost it. I'm a cook."
How much worse does it have to get until we realize that each of us are alone, yes, and so therefore, we are not?
How much worse does it have to get, President Obama? You keep warning us that the darkest is coming before we get our dawn.
What’s it going to take before someone starts telling us to come out of our houses of terror and take the hand of someone else?
What’s it going to take?
What’s it going to take to spread the wealth? Are we really going to call it socialism if it saves our lives? If it brings us together for a little stop gap on the livelihood hemorrhaging? This is not Che, this isn't Red Square, this isn't Stalin, Kant, Nietzche or even Nader. This is your neighborhood crumbling.
Mark my words: Change will come in the spring. That’s when all the guns come out. People get a little Vitamin D under their belts and hopelessness gets a little energy and the shootings will start. Remember that, right now, we’re only in the Winter of Our Discontent.
12:18 pm, 2.26.93: The Truck Bombing at the World Trade Center 12:07 pm, 4.19.93: The ATF Siege on the Branch Dividian Compound in Waco, Texas 9:02 am, 4.19.95: The Truck Bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City 11:19 am, 4.20.99: The Columbine Shootings in Littleton, Colorado 7:15 am, 4.16.07: Virginia Tech massacre
These were people who are operating at a Loss, Barely Getting By in the Emotional Red, Sucking Whatever Love They Could Off the Familial Lack, Down with the Not-In-My-BackYard Lack of Resource. These are people like the cloning couple and the breeding mother and the killing father.
It’s not about the economy, that’s right. But it is about our own internal resource of well-being that is just not there for us to lean on right now.
And it ain’t over till the Fat Cats stop feeding. And we all get off the roofs of our houses and start swimming.
i am sad. i am not ashamed of it, because it is true. i am not held hostage by it, because it is only part of who i am. i will protect, indulge and defend my sadness when it occurs or when it comes under attack. I will also defend the right of others to be sad. terror is any church, school, family, lover or boss that tells you there is only pain in living and you can only be happy when you're dead. screw that. i am happier being sad than dead. i have loved and i have lossed. the love and loss that i have will never die. it will only incorporate. the loss i have sustained, survived and am living will never die. it will only incorporate. i will live and love and lose in my own damn way until the day i inflict the ultimate loss onto those i have loved. then will my love and loss be someone else's to incorporate. but my sadness will never end. nor will my happiness ever cease. these are mine. SADNESS is MINE.
I'm a writer / producer of TV, new media and theatre. I have had and have inflicted loss. I have had good days and better days exploding with joy. I see and hear sadness in everything and everywhere I go, and I don't know why, but I consider it a blessing and a curse, but never is it a shame. I live in and am in love with Brooklyn, New York.
