Photo by eMMe
As a kid I knew no one would rescue me. I didn’t know it in a
complex “someone might help and they haven’t or won't.” I understood I was on
my own since that’s simply how it had most-always been.
One time, someone stepped in and stopped my brain from extreme
damage. Even then it wasn’t to offer comfort or provide support, it was to stop
the person who was shaking me, snapping my head back and forth, the sound of a
whooshing train filling my ears until it went silent.
Other than that single instance, my childhood was left alone to create a brokenness resistant to
healing. A pane of glass shattered in big and tiny taps until the pieces are so
small they aren’t a jigsaw puzzle requiring a long weekend, rather a bag of
birdseed scattered and eaten by a flock of swallows on a
layover before heading to San Juan Capistrano.
I offer this analogy after seeing photos of people in
Huntington Beach protesting against being protected, protesting over someone
caring enough about their health and the health of others to stand up for them.
Those photos have risen my despair so that it swamps my broken parts...the
elements of me that needed that kind of selfless concern. Those folks
protesting in Huntington Beach and across the country are throwing away care as
though care comes to everyone. To them, care is so prevalent or unimportant,
its value is worthless and the opportunity for it ought to be destroyed.
I don’t know if I believe in God the way others do. Perhaps that’s a product of what happened to me.
What I believe in is a collective be-ing from within all life
that is either cultivated into care and concern, thoughtfulness and awareness,
beneficence and value or it is turned over to dread and harm, hate and
putridness, and a rigid meanness and uncaring that breaks things and people,
scattering them to hungry birds on a layover.
It is no longer whether or not there are “someones” who will
rescue us from harm—that has been answered. We must save ourselves.
