Pray and

Good morning fellow humans.

I don’t feel like anything I could say is worth hearing or knowing right now. I don’t believe that any words I might pull from the air mean anything when there are children being murdered in the name of land and religion.

I know perfectly well this has always gone on, that children suffer daily in this world, but there is something about the current onslaught of brutality. The imagery takes me back to an event that is absolutely seared in my brain: September of 2004 when terrorists took over a school in Belarus. It was the first day of school there, so naturally the kids and parents were looking their best. The brutality in that event was mind-numbing: parents murdered in front of children, terrorists clothed in explosives. The children were not allowed food or water and many fainted after being forced to stand in the sweltering hot gymnasium for days. Bombs were detonated … many, many died. I can pull with ease the visual of the grandmother holding her dead grandbaby, rubble and smoke all around her.

It was a school and the kids were all dressed up for their first day.

I was pregnant that fall, with Coco, and that may be why the story and the imagery have never left me. Or maybe it was my own growing, gnawing disbelief at what one human can do to another.

And has been doing ever since the dawn of human time. How can we hurt babies? What on earth is wrong with us? And I say us because the human condition is a collective experience. We all exist on this closed-system planet. What one person does to another resonates and reverberates everywhere. If you think you’re sheltered or protected or can turn a blind eye or aren’t affected by the atrocities of this place, you are dead wrong.

Since 2004, of course, there have been hundreds of shootings in schools, here in what many consider to be the greatest country on earth. While certain news sources work very hard to convince their viewers that the biggest problem facing our society these days is gender confusion, young men buy assault rifles and murder Kindergartners.

High-five, US of A.

It’s one of the reasons why I shake my head in wonder when people talk about being afraid to die or reluctant to die. You think the afterlife could be worse than this? Really?

I saw the local suffering yesterday, just down the road in Bennington. Hollow humans skittering around town, backpack on, hood up, emaciated body. My friend on the rescue squad here in bucolic, idyllic Vermont tells me the drug-related calls and deaths keep rising.

I’ve even noticed more trash around me than I had seen in the past. Everywhere I go there’s trash on the ground, almost as if people have just given up. Or maybe the folks who used to care about the world around them are gone. I don’t know.

I find myself more frequently in recent times looking up at the sky. As if salvation might come from somewhere among the clouds. It feels like the tall, peaceful trees might be laughing at us, but they offer to me a little respite. Not that my life is challenging, it’s not. But the world is a mess. Maybe it always has been, but that doesn’t make it OK.

There is no cutsie wrap-up this morning, no witty or intelligent closure to be had. All we can do is pray. Pray and pray and pray and pray and pray and pray. And try really hard to be a better person. A MUCH better person. For the babies of endless war, please.

Beslan school, 2004

Amen, Melissa