Children of the Wasteland

It’s the solstice, 2008. Four years until that fateful alignment, whatever it may bring. One year to the day from when I realized I was on the wrong path, and systematically destroyed everything normal about my life in order to find the one I’m supposed to live.

So here I am, one year later in Saudi Arabia. Why did I give up an active music scene life, the freedom to drive, the freedom to wear whatever I wished, say what I wished, and hang out with whoever I wished in exchange for a monklike apartment in a second-rate private school? Why did I leave those I love? Why did I do this to myself? I don’t really know how to answer other than to say that I had to. I’ve never felt something so urgent or pulling in my life. I felt it and just knew. And jesus christ bananas I’m certainly not always grateful.

But I have never, in all my life, been able to feel as much as I do right now. I hope to carry this lesson, above all else, back to me. To never forget what it feels like to read the headline, “U.S. Drones strike Pakistan, Kill Seven,” and then get into a taxi in a strange part of town, having not been spoken to as an equal by ANY man other than a coworker for five minutes three days ago, and then be joked with and talked to like a person by none other than a young Pakistani driver. That happened today. That happened today after I got back from taking the tiny, starved kitten I found two days ago to the vet. After being told that the kitten, who I’ve named Oliver and who just yesterday seemed to be improving, would be very, very lucky to make it through Christmas. This, in a city where children regularly beat cats because they aren’t taught to love them, and because they get beaten too. This is not Islam doing the beating, it’s ignorance and it’s part of the veil of destruction that gets swept over this part of the world. Create an obscenely rich class and an obscenely poor one; give them no reason to love, and give them every opportunity to create violence, and you have the perfect recipe for madness.

Then, a smile, a kind word from a young Pakistani. I wonder if he knew about the bombings. We didn’t talk about it. Instead, he asked me about the kitten in my lap. He talked about how much he missed Pakistan. I told him how much I missed Texas.

This, after I sat in a room with 16 eleventh-grade girls who want to talk about politics all the time, and read them Brave New World all afternoon.

This, after three undersea cables were cut, shutting of Internet access to India and Pakistan. Hmmm. This, after finding out that McConnell’s plane was sabotaged. And that Patton was probably assassinated. After days of learning more and more that our “Heroes” who bring “Change” and promise “Hope” are nothing more than pawns for the same regime that’s been oppressing us for centuries.

Why do you think the greatest storytellers have told the same story over, and over, and over again, exposing the truth in fiction? Why do you think we continue to bleed for ideas we don’t believe in or condone? Why do you think they make us fear the Unknown, the Other?

Part of me shakes my head at our stupidity. But the other part raises her fist with the hope this will FINALLY make us realize what a sheer force of power we truly are. That we are more than just our bodies in this time and place. That we are every member of a Tradition that has resisted, time and again, a total eclipse of power. That we are light that rises, and remind us of a slow birthing spring, on the longest day of night.

This entry was posted on December 22, 2008 at 5:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.