Squawk & re-Squawk
We must squawk. Now.
I realize the dread and pity a doctor must feel when she looks at the x-ray on the light-box and the grainy gray shadows are undeniable, big, and in the wrong places.
Our beloved <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = “urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags” />America is sick, friends. Very sick. If we unsqueamishly look at the x-ray of the American heart, of the American soul, we can see the shriveling heart, we can see the broken soul, the swollen pride, the emergency about-to-burst self-righteousness whose seeping toxic pus is fatally poisoning our unsweet, uncivil, unwise interactions with the rest of our planet family.
We need radical, emergency action, citizens, beloved fellow journeyers. The radiant planet we could, we should share with glee and with mutuality of art and with ablazing heart is in peril. And we are each a voice in its healing. Denial is the sickness. That those who can still see, shrug, is the sickness. That in your secret heart, that in your dawn conversation with yourself, you are saying, “What can my one squawk matter? I would feel vulnerable, exposed, absurd. What can my one squawk matter anyway?” and you pour the comforting sugar-coated Frosted Flakes into your breakfast bowl and shrug.
What happens when it is your own country (a false & fading label) which is the addict in tragic denial? It is time. It is time for an intervention, a cool-headed, warm-hearted intervention. No more shrugging – squawking now. Small, persistent squawks. Today, your first deliberate act of squawk. At the water cooler, at the café, the bar; at lunch; hanging out at a colleague’s cube; finally e-scribbling the 176-word letter to the editor which has been drifting through your mind.
It is not the size of your first squawk, citizen friend, it is that it is deliberate. Move one small step outside your familiar zone, your comfort zone. Squawk to someone different. Squawk differently to someone familiar. It is the intent not the content which will change, will challenge the zeitgeist, the world pattern, the planetary psychic mosaic. Light up your little tile. It will add up. It will add up to illumination soon.
Squawk mildly if that’s your style. Squawk raucously if you prefer. What is eloquent is your intent. If you are saying, “By golly, I’m squawking!” to yourself, you got it.
Back when, an astronaut was asked, “Tell us about looking back at the planet Earth from space!” The astronaut paused and spoke, a calm and radical squawk (astronauts are calm), the most radical observation of the 20th century, the most radical observation in the history of the planet, “When I looked back at our home, when I looked back at planet Earth – what struck me when I looked back at Earth is that there aren’t any lines on it.”
No sentence turned my inner kaleidoscope, no sentence changed my own life more. “There aren’t any lines on it.” Of course! First there had been the stunning, heartbreaking photograph of the whole wondrous fragile planet suspended in immense space, the shocking heart-stopping gasp of the moment when many of us broke out of the cocoon and became planetary. It was the most important single photograph ever taken.
But ‘there aren’t any lines on it’ is vertiginously radical. Families, tribes, nations, creeds – we have so internalized the arbitrary lines, the imaginary borders outside of which or inside of which you can arbitrarily be placed — that we have actually instead of, say, taking care of each other, (e.g. planetary health care), taken our common treasure, our brow-sweat common wealth and built teeming and crescendoing weapon systems to mutilate each other. Instead of training soldiers of healing armed with syringes of polio vaccine, mosquito nets, and M-32 shovels to dig wells for clean water, instead we spend millions upon millions (one billion equals a thousand million) training energetic and idealistic young men to be soldiers of death-and-mutilation dealing. And those who would squawk out allow themselves to be cowed by those afflicted by virulent patriotism, a disease of curable blindness, of curable deafness.
The strident and belligerent theo-fascism of church, state, and corporations is in its last ugly throes. The chest-thumping patriarchal, hierarchical, to-win-there-must-be-a-loser, exploitative, model’s days are numbered. Most of our planet-sharing fellows have already got it, grokked it, or are on the cusp of that eureka. ‘Where is America?’ they look back concernedly and ask. America who dared the first ablazing step to be born into the pearlescent dawn of the first democracy, that giddy glimpse of justice and equality. Where is America now as we dare the step into the dawn of the 2nd democracy that includes all citizens of the planet?
Earth is the mother of each of us, Earth is the mother of our mothers – we are all one family. The invisible lines we so trumpeted, for which we despised, for which we killed – oh ye gods, there is blood on our hands, there is blood on all our hands, pilgrim – the invisible lines drawn on parchment, on paper, in blood do not appear running through the forests, over the deserts in photographs. The one planet, the same planet, the great ship, Home, bears us all, snug, in the vast galactic sea. Home, the planet is home to us all.
Do squawk and re-squawk. For the sake of your, of our darling Home. A squawk a day. America can be healed, and can contribute humbly and mightily to the care of Home. After the first gawky squawk, it gets easier.
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07.08.05
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for jamie fuller
We have come knuckle to nose with the small-time terrorists in London as opposed to the better armed terrorists with bigger bands you Yanks are fielding. They are all vile. I like to dream as I drift to sleep of the world when we abhor war as we detest slavery. I know the time comes — you've seen it, I've seen it, and many and ever more others see it.
What surprises me about you is how little distortion there is of both your voice and your vision brought across through the ocean-of-time from the future to our now. The slangier, silkier grammar of then you manage to translate seamlessly. I envy it.
The thing I can't figure out is your Mr. Fuller. I know it's none of my business locked off here in a faraway foggy land, but it looks to me as if he is a giant toad sitting on a lily pad while you write brilliant sonnets extolling his warty hide and he never bothers to croak? Or maybe he's so inarticulate that he can't speak up and you only adore him for his brainless brawn? There isn't a commentor I can peg as him.
All I can say is that if he ever comes to this side of the Pond, it's pistols at dawn, and I would treat you better.
shamanofdroll
He's shy.
No, he never even croaks or brays or grunts at the blood-writ sonnets. Sometimes I do think pistols at dawn would be the Fine Idea.
But when you've clambered up the Mount Everest of Funny sans oxygen and seen that view, knowing you're at the funniest place on the whole planet Earth, whatcha gonna do? There are plenty of treacherous flaws and ice canyons and howling white-outs, but The Funniest is The Funniest and not so many of us luck into any iest in any lifetime.
I appreciate the thought tho.
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