Long Haul

Waling for Peace

The simplest part of the morning was a 20-minute phone call from the Church Pension Fund, while a heroically patient woman tried to walk me through downloading my tax form, so I can file.

I’m embarrassed by how fragile my psyche is when faced with a glitch in the cyber world.

And what an impossible to endure person I become. To myself and anyone with the misfortune to be within earshot.

My worst self.

***

The hardest part of the morning is almost too painful for me to convey.

An email from our daughter, who teaches at a day and boarding school where their two sons are students.

One a senior, the other a sophomore.

As they were about to leave for school, they got word that a senior boy committed suicide last night.

When Lacey read me the email, I fell into sobbing as if it were one of my own children.

I doubt I know the boy, though we spend a lot of time there going to games, so I might recognize him.

That a teenage boy would, not only decide that his life is no longer worth living (what teenager hasn’t had that thought?), but that he would follow through, killing himself, arouses physical anguish in me.

***

I have been reading a lot (too much) about what has begun to be known as the Epstein Class.

People at the highest level of every discipline, who took part in the most sordid behavior. And what held that group of predatory people together? People who trusted no one?

It was having the goods on each other. They kept quiet because they were part of it. If I go down, you go down with me.

I heard Melinda Gates express sorrow that Bill Gates is among the Epstein files. She said she felt horrible for the girls who had been sexually abused.

Bill Gates!

Do you understand?

That boy who killed himself likely knew nothing about Epstein. But he was old enough, sensitive enough, to smell a rat.

When he began to wonder how he might spend his life energy, unless he was ready to sell himself to all that, he wouldn’t be invited into the Big Show.

Did I trust, in my lowest days as a teenager, that there was a way open, worth hanging on for? I think I did.

Turns out, there was a way…then.

We’ve set a trap for ourselves that is going to take some sort of huge change, if there is to be a way to free ourselves.

We have fallen for our own rhetoric. Or at least the naïve among us have.

A clever, cynical, predatory group has seen the way to make hay in a totally transactional, anti-social, society.

In which you matter to me only as much as what you can do for me.

And leave the idealistic suckers to fend for themselves.

***

For the past many days Basil and I have been walking La Jolla Shores, and I have been wearing a sign:

Walking For Peace.

I was inspired by the Theravada Buddhist monks walking through the American south.

I felt uncomfortable, drawing attention to myself. Wondering if I would make some people mad.

Lots of people have smiled, thanked me, given me thumbs up.

Many ignore me. A handful have said mildly ironic things: “Good luck with that. That’s going to be a long walk.”

The biggest thing that’s happened, is to me.

My despair has softened, just a little. My cynicism maybe diminished.

I got a glimpse of why Gautama is right. So is Dr. King.

Maybe that boy knows now, as his death wrenches grief from someone 3000 miles away, who didn’t know him…

That love is strong, stronger, even, than death.

Our job is to live every day as if it were so.

Even, maybe especially, on the days when we can’t believe it ourselves.