Anguished faces appear on the news at night. They are the faces of persons whose lives
have been disrupted by death, natural disasters or war. People who have suffered terrible losses that
they will never get over. Those are the faces
etched in my mind.
I feel helpless in their wake. I pray for them and I want our government to
help them, because as an individual I feel unable to do so. What can I do other than pray? I can see them, I can listen to them and I
can remember their stories. I can love
them even if from afar.
Perhaps, my prayers do help and my love and my
sorrow. I will never know, because those
things are like words flung as seeds out to places the sayer of those words sow
some to grow and some to lie fallow.
Nearly always when they show the drawn faces of the
adults if there is a little child near the person who is sometimes patting them
or soothing them even with just looks the child is squatting and playing if
only with a stick or a stone. The child
is smiling. The hungry thirsty child is
still smiling providing a glimpse of humanity for all of us to see.
Maybe it is the sight of those children playing in
the dirt amongst the rubble that causes us to hope that someday there will be a
better place and life for those folks etched in my, and hopefully our, brains
and our minds. How can we not want to
help those sisters and brothers shown to us not just for the children, but for
all of them as individuals and as a collective?
If it were not for brave individuals who go to those
places to bring us those images then my mind would rove to more pleasant things, because that is how I am. But
they go and show what is out there shaking us from our comfortable places and
replacing trivia with harsh reality of natural destruction or horrors caused by
man-made evil. Sometimes they die,
because they were there to show all of us those horrors.
We really can do little if anything about natural
disasters, but those folks doing evil could just stop. Even if they are doing what they think their
god wants them to do—if they stop for a moment to think then they can hear the
wee small voice in their mind and in their hearts. They know that what they are doing is wrong.
We know this, because many people who have been a
part of committing atrocities have later admitted that they were not fully
on-board with what they were doing. They were just following orders afraid of
being killed themselves if they did not comply with the evils they were being
told to commit. Not all felt this way,
but some.
Maybe all war falls into this category even for
those who fought on the winning side. I
know that the faces that tormented my father as he tried to sleep were with him
until the day he died. I can only hope
that after he, and others, die the individuals have a chance to meet to look at
each other seeing the others sad faces and hearts. I hope that they get to hug, talk and mend their
hearts and souls.
I can dream.
I just wish that it was in life rather than after death--if even then--that
we could see each other, care about each other, and want to bring smiles and
joy rather than death, destruction and despair to our neighbors twirling with
us on this small planet. I wish that we
could look, love, listen, feel and do; instead of the way we actually do.
©Patty
F. Cooper, Elizabethton, Tennessee September 19th, 2014
All Rights Reserved
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