Innocence Lost

Perhaps the earth shifted off its determinant position just a bit on that day he put his name in the ring. But, I had been picking up random signals long before.  My antenna hummed with data and even though I was unsure of its relevance, the health of the earth in general seemed to be moving in the wrong direction.  Storms raged, rhetoric rang out, people starved, women were raped and sold, little girls maimed or killed, tribes and armies continued to battle over rations large and small,  and plotters plotted. I tried to chalk it up to the collateral noise that the crawl of civilization wrought.

But, perhaps I am mistaken. Perhaps it happened longer ago, quite a bit longer. Perhaps it began back in 1963 when I was little more than an innocent child.  In the background, while I played on the merry-go-round on the school playground, tearing the skin of my knees near daily with little regard, the soaring, optimistic and eloquent rhetoric of JFK floated in the background, on the airwaves and on the rudimentary screens of early tvs. It was formed by voracious reading, disciplined thought, the highest of expectations, an outward view and an innate regard for others. I consider it lucky for me that his voice entered one ear and registered somewhere upon my psyche.  I was subliminally open to it and it soothed and steadied me, like an anchor, and somehow, impressionable child that I was, it shook open an inner core of optimism like the opening of one of those scabs of my knees and, dare I say a degree of moral optimism on behalf of all beings, that until this day inspires me and lives within like a flickering light as it is blown too and fro.

What stayed with me on some deep level out of all that childhood mélange that takes place over course of weeks and years, was a message akin to this: that’s what they are supposed to do, and sound like, and they will move the world forward and the worst-off peoples of the world will be cared about and made better, albeit slowly and partly by the generosity and benevolence of at least some of the most-blessed and richest of those on earth.   And then, one day, as I sat in the front desk, right-hand seat of two rows on the left-hand side of the room closest to the door at the Alfred Vail School, they blew the side of his head off with a rifle.

Having slept through most of my political life while attempting to stay in the water with my head barely above, I’d let most of the incidents which followed go by without giving much notice.  Stories surrounding WWII, even though it had ended nine years before my birth, seemed to be the most significantly unnerving, human-changing set of events to me, even as we sat in stairwells to prepare for air raids in the 60s – the equivalent of today’s school shooting drills.  Details of the events of those days resonated and stayed with me and I struggled, to understand the depths of the evil of man.

Gone are the days of innocence, perhaps an insufferable amount and duration of innocence, at the realities of the world, I suppose I would offer.  I grew immune to day to day events as I struggled alone to stay in the flow of my own life.  It never occurred to me to that I had a say in its direction, scope or substance, and while that is a story for another day, it may be a corollary to my prolonged attachment to innocence.

All along however, through the jading of my own existence but more deeply sewn of instinct, day after day, somehow I didn’t begin to somehow wonder if things weren’t the same any more, of the direction of things.  As I look now, today, I could make an argument that all of the Presidents who came after him have shakily played catch up, wobbling tenuously, but managing to keep more or less a sturdy center, but most especially for Obama.

Now is the time to consider if I hadn’t innocently and unconsciously bought the idea that America was the shining light, would always be, that we were the beacon of hope to be admired in spite of our own miscues, foibles and outright hypocrisies that I would only more fully ingest much later.  That we were the product of accumulated knowledge, synthesis of history and formation of an improved experiment that would grow an organic garden of thought and projection of common good, that now back-burnered concept.  Or did I innocently and ignorantly just need to believe so.

Despite who was running the show, through one administration to another, the general tenets of fearless leader seemed to me to continue.  Their talents, competence and eloquence varied widely  and yet, they all seemed to “get” what the job was.   I was not so naive as to believe that as the years wore on they were not without warts of one kind or another, but I felt deep within me that they would keep alive the basic flame to help guide the peoples of the earth toward a better existence, and perhaps even a heightened ability to embody for all, God’s self-given abilities.

Naive, oh yes certainly, with stitches carefully woven and tightened.  But, I felt deep in my bones that good was steering the ship above all waters.

And, then one day a man stood at the podium on tv and began to hurl insults at the line of what heretofore was expected to be a collegial assembly, to more or less gentlemanly or womanly debate their visions of the future while tastefully proposing changing course from the misaligned prior experiments.  A bad taste settled in the back of my mouth and the hairs on the back of my neck changed their porousness and grew wiry and taught.

Perhaps worse than the actual occurrence of his behavior itself was the tolerance of it.  Did I perceive each of those in physical attendance as well as the audience all across the wires tilt slightly back on their heals while at the same time unconsciously work to adjust to the change in the saturation of the oxygen in the room?  Not only did the participants struggle with an instantaneous adjustment, but those in the room whose job it was to report and assess seemed to feel like they were unexpectedly now playing on the wrong game board – you know, they were expecting a shady afternoon’s game of checkers when the greasy game of thrones slipped unnoticed into gear, and, without a blinker, moved into the passing lane and skipped ahead.

All is not calm and bright any longer when I awake in the morning.  The best and brightest among us struggle to keep a finger on the pulse while the game board constantly shifts around it’s erratic spin dial.  And, while the center around all pivots from moment to moment, the beacon flickers and struggles for its balance, its sense and its inherent goodness.

In imagery I see circular rows of dominoes being tumbled.  They mostly get put right back up but only to be cascaded back down again on a now wobbly foundation.  Metaphors?  A tsunami that comes in to claim the landscape and all who and which inhabit it, man, beast and plant.  Like after a devastating forest fire, a chance for a clear cut and new beginning or a re-start of the agenda.  But, who has bought into this agenda?  The language is now indecipherable and what were once well-meaning outcomes are now illogical spillage. And, the center is off.  I liken it to a spinning top that spins at the same time as it’s point shifts randomly across the surface its on.  There is no rhyme or reason to its motion and it seems funny to me now that someone conceived of this toy decades before the actual occurred.

I talk daily to myself in an effort to determine what is the lesson to be learned from all of this.  I work to see the light at the end of the tunnel. This must be what it is like to live in a country where a war is ongoing, I think.  One must go on daily to keep a center stable in one’s own eye, to eat, drink, breath, and protect one’s own family while the environs spin out of control and hatred and devastation and the worst of mankind reign. Have we just been way too lucky and indulged in our own carefully formed and coddled house for so long, too long, until the inevitable dangerous level of complacency set in?  Or, are we merely repeating a shaking of an civilization that is meant to decay and be replaced, like all of the great empires before us.

Corrupt leaders and spoiled environments have caused great losses before.  Rome had upon it all of the pieces of incestuous destruction to be seen and ignored for a long while.  Is this where we are – at a point where we can not decide whether to go forward in good or to succumb to our own deaf greed?  Have we lost the thread of decency?  Or, do we get one last reminder to re-right the ship, before the timbers and the frame rot from within and the mass of the vessel, the contents and the core rot from within.

The paralysis and smug self-interest bewilder me most.  The deaf ear has grown out of proportion to the head.  I sense the rustling underground of the founding fathers as they reconsider the assumptions of the basest dignity of man, their work, and howl at the holes they left 231 years ago. It’s not funny that they assumed too much.  It’s not funny that we do too.