By Susan Rhea
“I see friends shaking hands, saying, ‘How do you do?’ They’re really saying, ‘I love you.’” -Louis Armstrong, “What a Wonderful World”
I live on a busy Carbondale corner. From my “everything” table, no longer just for dining, I look out three large windows at the local world.
I see children playing as they wait for the school bus; I wonder if I hardened my sprinkler head enough and they won’t break it again. I see cyclists trying to keep rolling and safely enter the street, wondering if they are prepared for cold hands and faces. I see walkers with dogs and strollers, and each other. I worry when I haven’t seen some familiar elderly faces in a while. Are they on a trip somewhere, or did one of them get injured, or die? I see endless cars, trucks, funerals and vehicles parked too long in one spot. I wonder if someone is secretly living in that van, or hoping to. In the summer, I see children selling lemonade, learning how hard it is to make a few dollars.
Social media tells me about people brandishing guns, masked men in groups marching to front doors, people sprawled in the street with blood pooling around them. But that’s not what I see out my three big windows. I just see the ordinary world I’ve always seen. I don’t see the frightening world I read about or see on the news or hear about from late-night satire hosts.
I don’t see the people hiding in the margins, sleeping under bridges, sneaking in the shadows trying to get to work safely and home again. I don’t see people being harassed by masked people with guns or over-botoxed sycophants of our deranged Commander in Chief. I don’t see the hate some have for the “other,” the blood lust of a guy with a gun, a person shot and bleeding in the street. I don’t see the tears from unspeakable violence or hear girls or women begging a man to stop, to please stop.
I hear older people talking about lives after the Holocaust. I hear stories from people who were children when entire families disappeared into camps and war, who experienced the quiet takeover of a government, a country, and almost an entire continent. I hear their stories of how life was pretty normal, pretty ordinary, until it wasn’t.
Not equal at all, but providing a glimpse of hardship, from my own family I hear stories of extreme life-changes as the Great Depression took hold. From abundance and things as normal, to a slow (or sudden) disappearance of safety, being hungry but having to work all day anyway, making quilts out of every worn out piece of cloth — not because it was art, but because it was warmth.
I hear some war stories directly, from people who served. I read firsthand accounts of how horrible it was, how limbs, minds and heads were shattered, how soldiers and doctors liberating camps suffered mental breakdowns just from seeing the survivors. These stories were mostly buried. There was (is) a belief they needed to be locked away, that caring for your loved ones meant not letting them know those terrible things. People like our deranged leader have no idea about the reality of war, to both the bombed and those doing the bombing. And to be truthful, neither do we. I read about it, watch documentaries about it, listen to re-tellings, but I didn’t experience it, and most of you probably didn’t either. I imagine, and when I do, it hurts. I empathize. When you tell me a story, I’m in your shoes. I feel some of your pain, confusion and disbelief.
And still, that’s not what I see from my table, outside my windows. There, I see the world I’ve always known, and I continue hoping. I hope the future is different from the things I hear and read about. I hope the future is more like the world I see from my three big windows.
I came across one of Martin Luther King Jr.’s quotes recently, recognizing it as one that inspired Barack Obama and his book “The Audacity of Hope.” I’ve chosen it as this season’s inspiration, hoping that sanity returns, compassion returns, reason returns, caring for others returns, “love thyself” and “love thy neighbor as thyself” returns, “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” returns.
“We must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future” -Martin Luther King Jr.