New
Year’s Day, 2010. Very cold. My daughter, who just arrived at the
tail end of 2009, is sleeping in her rocking chair at my side. Many years
ago, the Irish poet, W.B. Yeats, also received the gift of a daughter in winter
as he was full-stride into his life, and he wrote an extraordinary poem about
her. It is called “A Prayer for My Daughter;” here are the first two
stanzas, two of the most gorgeous in the English language:
Once more the storm is howling, and
half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s wood and one bare
hill
Whereby the haystack- and
roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be
stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and
prayed
Because of the great gloom that is
in my mind.
I have walked and prayed for this
young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon
the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge,
and scream
In the elms above the flooded
stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of
the sea.
I have often thought of this poem at critical periods in my
life, in my friends’ lives, in my country’s careening life. It speaks directly to the fact of
change and the fear that often accompanies such change—“imagining . . . that the
future years had come” is how Yeats phrases it, and in one sense, the purpose
of these two stanzas is to announce this coming change and to plea for the
courage and fortitude to accept, endure, and finally thrive and grow within
this change.
But, in all of us, change brings out the fear of loss, and
the fear of loss generates an accompanying will to protect and defend those
things we feel are most threatened by this envisioned loss. And so we struggle to make good
decisions about what we can afford to lose, about what price we will pay if we
decide to defend those things we feel we cannot live without . . . those things
that we have, at times in our history, called “sacred,” or “unalienable,” or
“natural,” or “just,” or even “American.”
The past year has seen many such defenses undertaken for
many such causes: in Tibet, in
China, throughout Africa, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan. All of us who were listening have, to
use Yeats’ phrasing, “heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower.”
But if we are listening from America—and America has
announced its intention to listen on a global scale, and having listened, to
intervene and act where we deem it appropriate to intervene and act—we might
pause for a moment and have a look at the national compass as we begin the New
Year.
Americans will have blood on their hands again—trying
vainly, it seems at times, to winddown the war in Iraq as we kick-start the
one in Afghanistan, we will see the death toll begin to rise. These numbers—and bodies—will be
largely hidden from public view—nothing new in that—but the families,
communities, and loved ones who are affected by our continuous war will be
spared nothing in the way of grief and deprivation.
I do not envy those who find that they must argue for a just
war; I would only wish for them clarity as they come to terms with the
implications of their decision.
Americans will be denied the full public health care they
deserve because of simple greed at the corporate and political level. It is not complicated. As our politicians struggle to decide
how many multi-million dollar homes are appropriate for our health-care
executives, my wife’s nurse, Diana, is meeting her at the wound clinic on
holidays, evenings, whenever it is appropriate and necessary, to dress the
re-opened C-section that is now part of her recovery process. The doctors, of course, are
uncomfortable talking about the problem.
I hope that Diana, and all those like her, someday receive
their just rewards. It is
difficult to take our politicians seriously when confronted with the likes of Diana. And she is not a rarity in this
country. By the time a Senator
votes for an important piece of legislation, particularly social legislation, a
sizable proportion of the electorate is already practicing it far away from the
antiquated and gridlocked spectacle on the Hill. We shouldn’t have to wait for our politicians to endorse an
evolving reality. And thank God we
don’t; thank God Diana didn’t. Harry Reid has nothing to do with available health
care; Diana does.
Human rights, partly because of the Internet, has become a
larger part of our daily reality.
While Obama’s Nobel speech was disappointing, it was the only speech he
could have given, and the Prize made it more difficult for Americans to ignore
the fact that much of the world looks to us now to play a prominent role in
this struggle. The decision to
give Obama the Peace Prize amounted to a plea for America’s assistance in
bringing human rights to all who are living without them.
My hope is that we will respond with intelligence and
compassion to the human rights issue, but one thing is clear: our
elected officials cannot do it.
The story goes that when FDR was discussing the formation of The New
Deal and Social Security, he said to one of the program’s most ardent
advocates, who was questioning FDR’s commitment, “Of course, I agree with you
and the proposed programs. Now go
out and make me support it.”
I occasionally get the feeling that Obama is genuinely
sympathetic to human rights. If
only someone would make him take action on his sympathies. This would require an organized lobby to
bring diplomacy into alliance with a non-violent practice, and that’s a tall
order, taller, at least, than any Senator or Representative currently roaming
D.C.
When we think of the marquis human rights activists over the
last century—Gandhi, Tutu, King, the Dalai Lama—we see that they were not
elected officials, and that they gained clear advantages from not having to
satisfy an electorate’s whims, demands, and wishes.
But this much seems clear. From where I stand, I see a world that is simultaneously
violent and compassionate, and with a wide and ever-changing spectrum between
them. Slide the mixing tab along
the spectrum, like one of the color scales on your computer, and you change the
proportions of compassion and violence.
Happily or sadly, again, from where I stand, I also don’t see the tab
being pushed to one extreme or the other.
I suspect that we will never entirely rid ourselves of violence, nor
will we ever entirely lapse into the kind of bestiality we associate with
genocide.
But I do see some pushing going on, and I do see the
pressures levied by that pushing as driving the evolution of human consciousness. So when America commits troops to
Afghanistan, and the tab slides a little more toward the violent pole, and when
we listen to the reasons explaining why such a commitment had to made, it is
time then to push back, and if nothing else envision the alternatives, write
about those alternatives, sing about those alternatives, Hell, even bore your
friends stiff about those alternatives, and ever so slightly our consciousness
is modified, and the tab inches back, just a hair, toward compassion.
Gandhi, King, Tutu, His Holiness—these are the big
tab-pushers, and it’s sometimes easy for us to feel that our efforts, when
compared to the work of these extraordinary figures, is at best
insignificant.
But that’s not so.
If we look back over the last several million years of human evolution,
it’s clear that while smaller brains have been turned in for larger ones, and
four feet for two feet, human consciousness is also undergoing fundamental
changes as well. I’m not qualified
to discuss this in any detail, but I am qualified to suggest that human
consciousness is more easily and beneficially modified by each of us than is
the current size of our brain or the existence of our wisdom teeth. I’d footnote here the last 2500 year of
Indian philosophy.
You can, in fact, adjust your awareness of the world around
you, make substantial changes in how you react to it, and in so doing become a
bit of a tab-pusher yourself.
So start there.
2010 will be glad you did.
And so will my daughter.
