SHAME ON US

My son Callahan is almost three.  Several weeks ago, he and I went out to the local airport to watch the planes take off and land.  We wanted to see them up close.  We'd been watching them fly overhead lately, whenever we¹d been out and about.  At the airport, we saw lots of airplanes, all small, propeller-driven private planes.  We even got to sit in the cockpit of one of them.  It was really fun for us, and we left the airport all excited, deciding that we would both be pilots when we grew up.

The next week, when Callahan and I were at the library, we checked out some books about airplanes.  At first it was fun, looking at all the airplanes, and we were learning a lot.  But then there were all these pictures showing fighter planes shooting each other down and bombers dropping bombs on people like him and me.  Callahan wanted to know what these airplanes were, what did they do.  I just turned to another page.  I was ashamed to tell him that people actually kill other people.  I'm ashamed for all of us that we haven't outgrown this unconscious violence long ago.

I'm ashamed of this entire culture that we all live in.  We're still acting out our violence upon each other.  We're still letting greedy, lying, power tripping, and violent men run our lives.  We're still raising our kids to be just as unconscious and one-sided as we are.  We're still trashing our Home, our Mother Earth. We're still acting as if Spirit doesn't exist.  And we're still pretending that it's never us, always insisting that it's the other guy's fault.

What is wrong with us?  How can any human being ever let other human beings die of heat and suffocation out in the middle of the Afghanistan desert in those sealed container trucks?  How can any of us ever hurt another human being?  When Jesus said to turn the other cheek, he wanted us to understand that any angry response to being hurt would come from our hurt or fear and would further exacerbate the situation.

Many of us profess to be Christians.  Why didn't we remember what Jesus had said about anger last September 11th?  Why did we unconsciously lash out in anger, hurting many innocent people and ruining yet another already impoverished country?

What shall I tell Callahan and his younger brother Jake?  Shall I tell them that we have religions but don't even try to live according to any of them?  Shall I tell them that we prefer being unconscious and hurting others to dealing with our own hurts and fears?  Shall I tell them that we're so afraid of death that we side with it against the rest of life?  Shall I tell them that we learned to fly just so we could kill one another?

I'd rather tell them that we learned to fly so we would be closer to Spirit.  I'd rather tell them that any of us can do evil and that it is the mark of a true human being to resist such temptations no matter what the provocation.

(© 2002 Eugene Marks)