When You Live Next to a Waterfall...

A 7.9 earthquake just hit China killing at least 9,000 people, and that number is rising. A few weeks ago, a cyclone in Burma killed over 100,000 people and dead bodies continue to wash up on those shores. Tornadoes have killed hundreds in the Midwest in the past week. Genocide rages in Darfur, still. Violence continues to escalate in Iraq and Afghanistan. Worldwide inflation is forcing worldwide economic depression. The list goes on.

But what I’m most afraid of is the fact that we’ve become anesthetized. The apocalypse is upon us and we can’t even get up the energy to notice. After eight years of devastation, destruction, and death we’ve become completely numb. When the Twin Towers fell, it was all I could do to stay in school and not rush to my beloved New York to help. When the tsunami crushed Thailand, I rushed to the bloodbank and when the Red Cross told me that they actually had a surplus of blood, because everyone was donating, I sent money. When Hurricane Katrina hit, I donated more blood. More money. The day I graduated from college, I drove 700 miles to Washington, D.C. to take part in the Darfur rally. Later that year, I rallied for Darfur in Central Park.

And now? I see the news and I change the channel. I read an article, the news barely registers, and I move on to the next one. They say that when you live next to a waterfall, you stop hearing it. I know, from having lived in Iowa, that it only takes a few days to stop smelling the shit. If you close one eye, you can see your nose. But with both eyes open, your brain just ignores that piece of perpetual information. It’s our body’s natural defense mechanism. We learn to ignore too much of the same stimulus. That makes sense, of course. How else would we be able to go on living our lives if we let ourselves be crushed by the daily horrors of the world? After five years, we’ve grown tired of the Iraq war. People are still dying, but with no end in sight, the news media just kind of stopped caring. Ho hum, 300 more dead in Iraq. But did you hear what Rev. Wright said!?

A recent study found that Conservatives are happier than Liberals. That shouldn’t surprise anyone. Liberals’ modus operandi is outrage – at injustice, at war, at inequality, prejudice, etc. Their belief tends to be that we can help those people who can’t help themselves. But is anyone surprised that so many of the liberal, idealistic activists of the Sixties and Seventies grew into wealthy conservatives? How long can someone be expected to fight without seeing results? Eventually, exhaustion kicks in and people get tired of being angry. They get tired of fighting. The conservative mindset is a solipsistic one of isolation where the most important fight is for one’s own prosperity. Now that’s a fight that can be won. You might not be able to single handedly end genocide, but you can probably put your kids through college. Who can’t empathize with that? After the past decade, who can’t see the value in that mindset, if for only survival’s sake?

My conservative parents used to gibe me that if you weren’t a liberal as a kid, you didn’t have a heart, and if you weren’t a conservative as an adult, you didn’t have a brain. It’s obvious, of course, that the current batch of Republicans have neither brains, hearts, nor souls, but you’d be hard pressed not to at least understand that sentiment. We only have so much energy to give. Still, I’m writing this today to remind anyone that has become numb to the world, that sometimes it’s important to close one eye, stick that newly visible nose in the shit, then go out to take a look at the waterfall. I know we’re tired, but we have to avoid letting our fatigue turn into indifference. At some point, we need to remember what it was that made us rush to the blood banks and dig into our wallets. If we can’t work up the energy to be outraged, we at least need to remember why we were outraged and understand that there are still things worth fighting for, even though it feels like the fighting may never end.



You can click here to donate to the Burmese monks, which is about the only way to guarantee that aid reaches the people of Burma, since the government would rather pocket your money than use it to help its people.