When Reality Hits, it Hits Hard

Warning: Strong emotional content.

While I'm writing this, Lyra is working on devouring an entire box of shredded wheat, and we're watching cartoons. The sun's out, sort of, and the birds are singing and Chris is doing the crossword. This all seems so normal, so very placid and mundane, almost a cruel contrast to my turbulent inner world.

When you've spent five years of your life trying to be someone else, trying to be someone responsible and mundane and concerned with nice houses, nice furniture, a nice education; trying to raise children and not run away; just trying to be a normal American with a normal life... when you let that go, when you step outside of yourself for just one moment, the result can be earth-shattering.

Last night, I cried in a movie theater. The movie, Persepolis, shook me to my core, making real for me a reality that I could never emotionally comprehend through history books or the daily newspaper.

The last time I remember crying like that was in July 2006. The day before my birthday, Hezbollah launched rockets at small Israeli border towns... the day of my birthday, Israel retaliated by bombing, I think, a Lebanese hospital. I didn't know this until the next day, when the front page of The Oregonian showed a man turning away from the wreakage, his face iced over with the shock and the sadness. In his arms was a dead boy.

I just... cried. What else could I do? I was immobilized by this picture of the man and the boy; I didn't know what was going on, how these people could bear to even live, day after day. I couldn't understand how I could live my little tidy life, fretting over the grade I got on a paper or whether I shouldn't be feeding my one-year-old more organic foods. I didn't know how to break free of this blindness, because that's what it is, it's blindness but also ignorance and desensitization to the happenings in our world.

Of course, the next day I was fine.

And then, this. This that has again shaken my world except that this time I feel ashamed. I feel shame for getting on with my life, for saying things like hating the war but not ever doing anything, you know? Because we don't know what there is TO do; we don't know anything, really. Sometimes we read about the casualties in the paper and feel bad for their families, but really the overriding emotion tends to be one of mute disbelief, wondering if the kid thought that war would be glamorous, if he thought he was serving his country, if he believed in the righteousness of the war, if he really thought that he was somehow invincible. Didn't he know that war kills?

Do I really know that war kills? Isn't it an abstract concept, really, to those of us who have never even seen death? Have you ever seen someone shot or crushed beneath the rubble of a bombed building? Have you had to live with yourself after shooting someone else?

I don't know what to do, don't know how to rectify the darkness of this feeling with a new possible reality. I don't know how to help. I'm afraid that this feeling is going to be replaced by numbness; that I'll go on with my own hen-pecking concerns and forget all about this.

For now, I can only learn about the world around me: the world I know so shamefully little about.