We All Pay Attention, but to Different Things
Passions and Fashions, as the World Crashes and Thrashes
WE ALL PAY ATTENTION, BUT TO DIFFERENT THINGS
When my friend Samara called me today, she began by saying, “I called to say you were right.” She laughed. “There, that’s out of the way.”
What she really called to discuss---I knew since I had been savoring this chance for “I told you so” since she left me a message last week---was how freaked she had been since her Shiite Iraqi husband had returned to the Fallujah area, to try to salvage whatever bits and pieces of family and fortune might still be possible to save. I couldn’t wait to remind her, “well you know…”
She knew me far too well to let me finish, however. “Yeah, yeah! I know, I know. Civil war in Iraq and us getting our asses kicked, just like you said.”
We’d been playing backgammon, around the time of her 49th birthday, February, 2003, and she had essentially said: number 1, I was full of shit for suggesting that Iraqis would be anything other than gleeful for our help in eradicating Saddam Hussein’s presence; and number two, I was full of shit(she laughed derisively at the very idea)for even imagining that anything other than a quick and painless, overwhelming victory awaited us.
Needless to say, while we rolled dice and moved checkers and raised our voices, I got a bit peeved that she could not see how wrong she was, and I had assumed she was pissed as well. I told her so today. “Yeah, I know, you got steamed last year when I warned you and Karim about all of this.”
Her reply was instantaneous. “No I didn’t!”
“Oh, right, Sam! You did too. You…”
“No,, listen. You get passionate about things. You’re passionate about peace, you’re passionate about all those things, but I get passionate about the little things. I’m selfish; I don’t care that much about what doesn’t affect me.” She talked for a couple of minutes about this idea, and there I stood, in the Caribou parking lot, at fifty, finally getting this: that lots of people could give a shit about the big picture, understanding the world, making a difference morally or spiritually or materially outside their own immediate circle of family and friends. Coming to this understanding---in my gut, as opposed to the intellectual nod I had always given such points---was pretty amazing, really.
I listened hard to everything she said. When she finished, I said gently, “You know, Sam, all these things DO affect you and yours, though, you know what I’m saying/”
She admitted as much but added, “It’s hard to see it in advance; there’s so much going on all the time, so much to worry about,” and here she wept and told me of the travails in her life, her fears for the only man who had ever loved and accepted her in spite of her fundamentally fucked-up attitudes toward a lot of things, that left her like a fat, greedy, graspy, needy little girl much of the time. I listened to that child cry and commiserated with her about the difficulties of life, in spite of the fundamental blessing of existence.
Samara is one of the characters about whom I’ll occasionally post. She has had an UNBELIEVABLE life, from her 1953 birth in Havana to a numbers-racket mafia lieutenant daddy and NJ JAP mama, to this marriage to an Islamic mensch, who may be a bit of an opportunist but is basically just trying to navigate some portion of his kin to a livable place in the sun---having already lost a brother, a sister, and countless cousins to the nightmare that Iraq has been, off and on, since MI5, British Petroleum, and the CIA consecrated Saddam and the Baathists in 1959, in order to preclude anything democratic, and hence socially progressive, from standing in the way of untrammeled control of oil.
But neither Sam’s incredible story, nor such analysis and argument as the two of us had over BG a year ago, are the point of today’s text. I just had to share the discovery that many of the times in which I’ve felt people were angry and obsessed, the only thing that was happening was that I was angry and obsessed. It’s not that I’m condescending to folks. I still INSIST that the time has come when everyone needs to pay attention, if the collective of cousins we call humanity is to avoid a universal ass-whipping.
Somehow or other, however, my role in all this has to be to reach people just where they are---taking care of their own selfish interests, worrying about their families and their jobs, pondering silly personal problems as if these dilemmas were independent of all that is transpiring globally. I’ve always known this in the abstract, but having this conversation showed me this truth in a way I’d never really been able to see it before.
I’m passionate about peace; I’m passionate about justice; I’m passionate about compassion and love; I’m passionate about tolerance; I’m passionate about life, life with a capital L, all of these terms capitalized. Maybe I actually have a calling---as opposed to an egotistical longing---to reach millions and millions and millions of people with all my ideas and stories and notions of ‘goodness gracious me!’ But in order for this calling to come to pass, one way or another, I have to connect with people where they are, or at the least not expect them to follow me to the level of engagement in which I’m interested.
Anyhow, blabber, babble, ramble, grumble, Lord let me speak without a stumble, find a way to be hot and humble, bring all my friends to the coming rumble in exactly the fashion that will allow survival, growth, and peace in the aftermath.
For today, anyway, that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it!