And Now that I Am

Its hard enough raising a child who is born wanted by two parents, surrounded by family and friends who are in harmony, have the resources, will, maturity, and the time, living in a society at peace, with a history of social justice, tolerance and inclusion. *Its hard enough* If that scenario ever exists.

Now strip all that away. Add pain, fear, loneliness, lack of resources, housing insecurity, income insecurity, no history to recall on to find hope, no one to call at all. Knowing your baby, the one you had no choice but to bare and birth, was just excuse for that society to further grind you down to being nothing. You and your baby. Just in case there was a slim chance of you reaching towards a fair share of what is good.

And now think of the crying. A mind, body and if there is a soul, that too, being stretched to the limits of existence while a tiny developing brain wraps itself around continuous want and neglect, sucking on the dry teat of hypocrisy, of an ideology that used your abstract beginnings for its politics. If this brain develops enough to speak it can only say:

“I was not and then I was, but only as part of your agenda. AND NOW THAT I AM I am NOT WANTED. not really, you BUY ME nothing more than A GUN.”

There are worse things than terminating a pregnancy. Everyone knows it. We come closer to caring for each other when we give access to safe abortions to those who need them.

Mother’s Day

Arise, then, women of this day! Arise all women who have hearts,
whether our baptism be that of water or of fears!

Say firmly: “We will not have great questions decided by
irrelevant agencies. Our husbands shall not come to us, reeking
with carnage, for caresses and applause. Our sons shall not be
taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach
them of charity, mercy and patience.

We women of one country will be too tender of those of another
country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs. From
the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says “Disarm, Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance
of justice.”

Blood does not wipe our dishonor nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons
of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a
great and earnest day of counsel. Let them meet first, as women,
to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the
means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each
bearing after their own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
but of God.

In the name of womanhood and of humanity, I earnestly ask that a
general congress of women without limit of nationality may be
appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at
the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the
alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement
of international questions, the great and general interests of
peace.

Julia Ward Howe
Boston
1870

Digesting the jagged

I am sick of war. I am tired of us and them.  Let’s focus on what it is like to be human. Fear feels the same for all of us, suffering from violence feels the same for all of us. We need to stop feeding into what fuels violence and what always incites it. And what that is, is a sense that we are different in important ways, that we are entitled in some way that others should not be (because of this and this and that) and some people are just too different to be allowed to breathe.

 

All people die when one person dies and how everyone dies is important. We don’t want assault rifles in our clubs or our homes .  We don’t want assault rifles killing anyone anywhere anymore people of the world. We are sick of the war on this and that.  We want peace with this and peace with that and peace with each other.

 

This is when I am usually informed that I have missed the point. Eat your point. Break it into all its tiny pieces so you can swallow it. Stop sticking it in my face. Yes, I am angry. But I use words.  I am heartbroken but when I feel this way I cry.  I don’t fight.

 

When we all feel better we can talk calmly about how we are not so different. We can talk about loss and fear and how we want to share a better world.  And those jagged pieces that we both have had to swallow, we can digest and perhaps even come up with legislation to improve things.  How’s that for extreme radicalization?

Why I love Doctor Who and Stuff About Heroes, Real and Imagined

Doctor Who is an alien. He has known countless lives, he is oblivious to conventional human society with all its ways of distancing self from other and he passionately loves us. He continually rushes in to do what is right. He is full of doubt and pain but he nevers tires. He is the embodiment of our disolocated, unstuck in time, brave and compassionate best. He is a good fictional role model.

I watched a documentary on child soldiers last night. Our most lovely hero, Romeo Dallaire who “shook hands with the devil” has gone back to Africa to address the issue of child soldiers. He is a unique individual because he will sit close enough to reach out and hold a hand of a father who has lost his children to a militia, who has lost everything infact. Dallaire finds the thread in his own life that he can share, “I too am a father”. He makes a connection. He recognises the evil of using children as weapons and tells us, even though we don’t want to know. He knows these children. They have been abused and manipulated by thugs who want to rule with terror. Romeo Dallaire, a soldier, believes that a better world is within our grasp now. He really does. He is not advocating bigger guns but the opposite, bringing everything down to the very personal and responding appropriately, like Doctor Who, except he is real, like us.

I have been trying to write a book about the loss of innocence called “The Children’s War” for ten years (yes, I am a bit slow). I ask myself, why is science fiction the most appealing setting for me? Why so often is this the genre for us to work out so many of our own issues?

I think we make up stories about people who are who we would like to be and we feel more comfortable if what they have to deal with is not so close to home. We call them Saints or Heroes or Aliens and yet the essential truth of the best of our created characters is that they don’t require anything special, not a Tardis or a War or a God because it is their choice to do the right thing that defines them.

Remembrance day is not about making up stories about the glories of war but about recognizing the very difficult and necessary actions carried out by those who saw something needed to be done against criminals and thugs who would try to rule. It was for peace that they fought and died. That is what makes them heroes.

Depaysement

This is an excerpt from a science fiction book I have been trying to write for a long time. I watched a documentary on TVO based on Romeo Dellaire’s book “They fight like soldiers…” and I wrote a bit about heroes and the meaning of Remembrance Day but instead I think I will share this chapter. I think it stands well on it’s own. Warning: This is not a funny post. There are references to violence not appropriate for children, even though it is about a child.

Depaysement

They shaved my head and shaved the cat too. We make quite a pair, skin and bones and no hair.

I have to watch she doesn’t scratch too much. They might think she has fleas and take her away. I check her closely but you never know. There are so many things that can go wrong, parasites and such.

The food comes regularly, every four hours I think: Little bits of this and that and weak tea, always weak tea. Not that I’m complaining, at least you know it’s been boiled. The cat sips what I leave in my cup cooling on the floor under the cot. I never knew a cat to drink tea before.

I sleep pretty very well. It’s quiet here.

The floor is cold. Once or twice a day I put my bony ass on a pot and do my business. There’s even a box of sand for the cat. The nurse comes and empties both every day. I guess it’s embarrassing but what can I do? I only mention it here because there’s so little that happens day to day.

They keep the place very clean at least.

Sometimes the cat snores. Maybe she has some congestion in her lungs. That’s a worry. Right now she is sleeping. Her one leg is outstretched and her paw is on my calf. She likes to be near me. I’m am writing this sitting up in bed while she sleeps.

Day two

I will write a bit about my life before I woke up here.

When I first saw a wanderer I was so young I didn’t even know what he was.

I was still playing with sticks, making little houses and telling myself stories while my mother worked.

I was playing in the cellar where we stored the root vegetables. It was a hot day and it was nice and cool down there. First I saw his bony feet on the steps. They were the same colour as the dirt floor. He was dressed in bits of cloth, wrapped with ribbons, like he was a present. I wasn’t afraid because of this. His face had paint smeared across it and his hair was gathered on top of his head and looked like a bale of wheat when it is bundled in the field to dry. I think I smiled.

But then there was the loud crack of my mother’s rifle and he crumpled and then fell, right on top of me.

I must have been screaming for a long time. My mother said she was sorry over and over. She didn’t see me. She had to kill him she said. She made me tea with milk and lots of honey and held me and rocked me for a long time.

The next time I dared to go near the cold cellar, there was nothing left to show he’d ever been there.

Day Three

The soup today smelled of garlic. I only mention it because the food here rarely smells of anything. I have no idea where these people are from but they seemed to have made a science of bland food.

We use to grow garlic. My mother made the best garlic soup. “People will always need to eat” my mother would say.

It makes me sad and happy to think about my mother. How can the two feelings happen at the same time?

***

Day eight/entry eight

I don’t think it has only been eight days that I have been here. I think I have been sleeping a long time. I am feeling better but I am also feeling worse.

I don’t believe there is much cause to go looking for things to feel sad about, but sometimes sad things pursue you.

I will tell you about walking and walking: If you walk long enough you become WALKING.

I will tell you about being pushed and shoved and about being afraid to cry. After a while you feel like you are made of wood.

I will tell you about seeing people get their heads cut off. It happens very fast but it also happens very slow. They look surprised. They look right at you even when their head isn’t attached any more.

See?

It is always raining and when it is not raining it is snowing and when the weather is fair it is too hot or too cold. There is always hunger, anger and fear. Mostly, there are lots and lots of days of walking.

Sometimes we celebrate and our leaders make speeches and we drink and chant and dance.

We are soldiers. We are wanderers. Our war is against everything. We move like a storm from village to town, stealing and burning and then moving on.

The loudest is the Leader today. Tomorrow, maybe you get to be the leader. Maybe tomorrow you will get drunk and have sex with a girl and eat until you are full and then kill some more people.

We never stop for long. We move into a town or a city and after we kill anyone who will stand in our way, we line the boys up and ask them if they want to join us or if they want to die and lots of them die but lots of them join. We give them a gun and we make them shoot their families.

The boys that cry we cut off their heads. Most stop crying.

Everyone cheers and slaps the ones who join on their backs as if they have done something special, as if they are heroes. Some of them even smile. But they are not really smiling. They are not even really there anymore. The real boys are gone and in their place are the arms of the monster.

I know this because I killed a boy. He looks at me from the mirror, pale and frightened. He is asks me to testify but there is no one who can hear my confession.

I whisper all of this in the dark to my cat.

I can never go home. There is no home for me now.