I had a series of titles for this week’s story, each one reflecting the theme of the moment. My first one was Denial, reflecting how so many of us seem to be in some lobotomized state of mindlessness, sidestepping the seriousness of the times. I moved on to Breathe Your Breath, lobbying for each of us to quietly focus on our breath, to kind of recalibrate ourselves in the midst of these storms. Toward the end of the week, I was liking Behind the Curtain, a take off on discovering the witch in the Wizard of Oz, seeing the evil manipulation for what it is.
I take this job very seriously, even though it’s not a job at all. I don’t know about you, but when I put my name on something and lob it out into the world, it’s a big deal. For a very brief time, while I am putting these stories together, it is the most important thing I could ever imagine doing. In the midst of this temporary distortion, I read a news piece about 2.4 million children in Yemen, who will be pushed to the brink of starvation by the end of this year. The wheels of my mind stopped dead, frozen to this idea and wondering why this is nowhere to be found in mainstream media. I can read about Halle Berry’s exercise regimen, making her look far younger than her 53 years.
Please don’t get me wrong, I think Halle Berry is a very talented actress, but two things strike me about this news. Why is this something she feels necessary to share with the world and why does the world feel it is worth sharing? 2,400,000 little beings are starving in Yemen, a part of the world no one particularly gives a shit about. What kind of world would not find this incredibly important and easily remedied?
Saudi Arabia has been unmercifully bombing Yemen into oblivion and they are doing it with it American weaponry, for which they pay cash. Around a year ago, a Saudi born journalist, living in America and working for Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, entered the Saudi embassy in Turkey to obtain a marriage license. There, he was killed, dismembered and then disappeared into a vat of acid. Years before, on September 11th, the only one that matters, an overwhelming majority of Saudi’s bombed the Twin Towers in the city I love and killed 3,000 people.
The world came to a deafening halt on that day. It was an inescapable signpost on the Yellow Brick Road, the first of many more to come. On that day, America had a choice, before Yemen and Kashoggi. We chose to bomb the shit out of Iraq, instead of refusing to fill our pockets with Saudi cash.
I was living off a dirt road, off a dirt road, identified on the way to Espanola, NM as La Puebla. Honestly, I am not sure why it even had a name, because there was nothing, but mesas and nondescript, sloppy roads snaking in between them. I was living in this little adobe home, selling Gospel music videos on Black Entertainment Television. This house had a bizarre history of how it came together, but I will spare us, partially because I don’t even remember it all. My friend, Michael, called and told be to turn on the television. I got to watch those two planes repeatedly fly into the World Trade Center, a place with the biggest elevator doors I had ever seen in my whole life. I even once attended a network television sponsored lunch at the restaurant at the top, that ever so slowly rotated a 360, no kidding.
Fear and distrust were a direct byproduct of that horror, manufactured by those in charge, the ones who to stood the gain the most from shrinking all of us into a state of impotence. It was nearly twenty years ago and there was no serious talk of climate change, the growing, criminal disparity between rich and poor, nor the completely unresolved issue of racial injustice. You know, even saying the words, racial injustice, seems like cold, textbook terminology for a kind of enslavement that crushes a child before his first breath.
Every damn thing that has happened since that Tuesday in September can trace its lineage to that day. Yes, I know most everything we are dealing with has roots going back long, long before, but it was the response in that moment that has jammed us into this electric chair of consequence we now find ourselves.
Greed is eating the soul of America. It is why all those little kids, dying in Yemen don’t mean shit. It is why the oil and gas monolith continues to burn our hard earned tax dollars, knowing all along they were responsible for poisoning our air and warming our planet to unlivable heights. Just this week, the Arctic hit a temperature of over 100 degrees, in many ways just as shocking as the number of kids starving in Yemen. What is it going to take for us to realize this is not Oz? We are not a marvelously, naive little girl with grossly overpriced, red slippers.
This goddamn virus has forced us to look behind the curtain. The witch is not some emotionally depraved, orange-stained hamburger of a man. It is all of us, you and me. It is not because of what we have done, it was what we have allowed to happen right in front of us.
I can’t let this go without a word about science. When I was 10, I had a doctor’s office in my unfinished basement. My single patient was Robert Ross, who bruised his knee. His was the only written upon index card in my alphabetized box. I actually thought about being a doctor, but it only took one little, dead pig with blue and red dye injected in its veins to retire me from pre-Med at Queens College. However, I grew up with a profound respect for those people, who searched for the truth of our lives. I am gonna keep wearing a mask. I want to know what Dr. Fauci has to say, because all he cares about is finding out what the hell is killing us and how to stop it.
Lastly, I have no right to comment upon Black Lives Matter and I won’t. Okay, I just want to say this one thing. I am a Jew and somewhere, buried deep, deep in my DNA, there is a memory of having the gold fillings ripped from my mouth, stripped naked and led at gunpoint to showers from which I would never return. My crime was being Jewish. My heart breaks over this injustice and even the word feels so incredibly hollow, as if I have no right to even comment. I am so terribly sorry.
All of this feels so overwhelming, which is where I found myself before getting started. There is no denial seeing where we are and how we got here. Breathing our breath is an ancient way of grounding and you can do it anytime it’s all too much. Our history is not a pretty one and we are being gifted a rare opportunity with all that is going on. Let us take it.
Breathe in, breathe out and do it all over again.