May 28, 2007

Mindfulness:

Don't Transfer the Ox's Load to the Cow

The red, white and blue went up around here about a week ago. If you don't live in the suburbs, you may not know that there are now patriotic door wreaths to hang during the span from Memorial Day to July 4. Of course, we have flags too, about every two feet across every highway overpass, and today the house that had a hand-made sign wishing Jesus a happy birthday in December now has Old Glory on the right sight of the steps and a U.S. Marine flag on the left. The latest style of Old Glory, by the way, is a flag hung in a curved, fan shape, such as was the style in the 19th century. I have to say, these decorations have the wrong effect on me because when I see them I don't think of the country and it's glory-- I think of barbecue. These flags absolutely make me hungry for grilled food. It's not in the least un-American and I don't feel bad about it at all. That ain't my point. In fact, call me if you are grilling, especially if you will have some nice toasty corn on the cob smoking over coals.

Because of this culinary connection I have forced myself during the John Wayne marathons and between frankfurters to think about Memorial Day as something besides the onset of summer. In recent weeks I prodded a friend to go to the Veteran's Administration for some long overdue assistance. The experience has become a fascinating story to me, not one of the failure to provide services, quite the opposite in fact, primarily because the people working there are themselves vets, and highly motivated to deal with whatever cards they are dealt in order to help. Despite the way in which the VA has been cut back and
hamstrung, the folk at this VA center have been thorough, effective, courteous and above all, have dished out heavy ladles of respect. They have honored my friend by telling him what he has done with his life matters and by being honest that he should have sought and received more help long ago. This has gotten a man almost prone on his feet.

I also recently saw a one-hour film called The Cats of Mirikitani, which was, as a friend put it, a most beautiful film about love. In the film, the filmmaker tells you early on that she knew Jimmy Mirikitani slightly. He was then an 80-year old homeless artist who worked and made his living selling these Matisse-spirited paintings (often involving cats) around Greenwich Village. She saw him still there the day after 9-11 and insisted he come and stay in her apartment as the air below 14th Street was both thick and toxic and without saying it, we survivors remember, it was a lethal air for the mind as well. It smelled like what it meant.

The filmmaker, despite his garrulous objections, investigates his social security status, and finds (as he had already told her) that his citizenship was taken away during World War II when he and his family were put in one of the internment camps for Japanese Americans. He was a teenaged artist then doing the most amazing classical sorts of Japanese painting. Years later, his citizenship had been restored but thegovernment document informing him of this had never reached him because by then he was homeless and living on the streets of New York.

This is the kind of transfer of the ox's load to the cow that went on then and goes on now. Rather than trying to serve the soldiers or the American citizens who look like we think the enemy looks, our representative government has transferred the care, feeding and protection of our citizenry to other citizens who act on their own to help, be they VA workers or New York City filmmakers. The restoration of New Orleans has been shifted to the homeowners who are rebuilding with the help of thousands of temporary volunteers rather than the help of FEMA. The ox's burden has been shifted to former Black Panthers running grassroots groups, worn out ministers, occasional movie stars, talk show hosts, filmmakers and anchormen determined to keep it from being left to developers. The New York Times this week had letters to the editor suggesting many alternatives, a corporate tax, or a collective rebuilding made by a group of corporations as a donation, razing the wrecks left and replacing homes for original owners-- and other ideas explicitly put forward on the premise evident that the government will not rebuild a great American city.

Officials are carping at each other and not paying attention to the massive trauma being committed to the country and particularly its soldiering men, women and their families. Even if the war should stop tomorrow, the human and financial damage to be repaired is almost staggering. If the war keeps going it all becomes incalculable. My friend who served in the army in the Korea/Vietnam "advisers" era was told by one of his two VA reps that he should have come in 50 years ago! Well, he did go to two VA hospitals then and they are well aware that despite a wonderful and productive life that the damage is still there. War brings long-term injury, not something taken care of by a few weeks of rehab or therapy.

Mirikitani, who can act a bit daft, sat in the filmmaker's apartment, not watching the news as she did, muttering "stupid government." It was actually funny to hear it but not funny at all. The frightening days after 9-11 were, of course, like the frightening months after Pearl Harbor. He went to a commemoration at Tule Lake, Utah, where he spent three years and relived with others the experience there. My friend and anyone else who ever served or were put in camps as citizen prisoners or soldier prisoners of war are all watching the IED bombings and their victims and the news of kidnappings and beheaded soldiers in the Euphrates and reliving their understandings of war too. They are reliving the deprivation of their citizenship, while those who have not been through it are, presumably, trying to make sense of all the chatter, the debate, the role of leadership, the media, blah, blah, blah. The oxen's loads "the costs of war in misery" are being passed on the cows, those who have already been hurt, those who are
out of work, and those whose homes were taken by disaster and the gutting of the public trough.

Hang out your flag if you have decided to help get the load back to the ox cart. Hang out your flag if you have decided to help be an ox when institutions are failing. If you helped someone this week. Hang out your flag, if like Maxine Hong Kingston, you've been sitting in a room and letting veterans of any of these wars tell you a story to remember with them. Hang out your flag if you have raised your voice recently against targeting people of color in the immigration debate or in the diminution, dilution or enforcement of anti-discrimination measures. Hang out your flag if you have written someone to say stop the madness or help these battered souls who have suffered the modern warriors "plaguing dilemma” doubt.

The 300 Spartans of yore, who fought to the death in a quarry where the Athenians trapped them, did not, it
is said, worry with doubt. We live in an age when it is inescapable even to a person living at a far remove from the cynical metropolitan centers that war may be about corporate profit, killing innocent citizens, profiling and detaining people whose names or phone bills suggest the wrong connections. People who risk their lives these days do so at the risk that it may be for nothing, for reasons they don't value, or for passions that are dangerous to all life on the planet. Hang out your flag if you are against people being killed by the thousands with doubt hanging over the point of war. Make it a Buddhist windsock, or some other flowing colors of peace and compassion.

Hang your flag if you can say, when they drop you in the urn or in the ground that you have done something to sustain the life of others. I don't mean giving away your old clothes. I mean help like a black woman from Baltimore who single-handedly raised money to keep a food station going in Darfur. Or another sister I saw on the news who made a commitment to put nearly a dozen most at-risk kids through college when she was making $35,000 a year. Only two didn't go. I mean, help someone learn to read, get a job, go to college. I know plenty of you do help because I wouldn't be sitting here clicking on these computer keys without you and it has made me realize there won't be any long encomiums for me either on that great getting up mo'nin'. I feel heartily ashamed at not having ever even thought I could mentor a bunch of kids from eight-years old to college age, much less raise the money to send them there. Being a writer may be an impoverishing vocation but it is still one of the most selfish pursuits on the planet. I'm not saying anything to you that I am not saying to myself this Memorial Day weekend. So if you have been doing that good work, and not shifting the ox's load off to the cow that can't carry it, hang out your flag.

Otherwise, get out your stars and stripes door wreath and light those charcoals. Cause right now, that's what a red, white and blue door decoration means, skip the facts, put some sauce on that cow, and pass the biscuits, please.

Don't Transfer the Ox's Load to the Cow

In gassho,

Thulani Davis

copyright 2006 (ridgeway / ng)