John Swinburn

If only we teach the hungry to grow their own food, they will solve world hunger.

If only we educate farmers about the effects of pesticides, they will clean our planet.

If only we inform timber company executives about global warming, they will stop clear-cutting rain forests.

If only we teach tolerance to religious zealots, sectarian violence will end.

Or, maybe, the hungry will grow fat

Maybe the farmer will import non-native insect predators that will devastate local ecosystems.

Maybe the timber company executives will invest in Amazonian sex slavery rings.

Maybe the religious zealots will teach that tolerance of genocide is the only true word of God.

We can’t always know the effects of our actions.  Unintended consequences abound.  I remember when wind energy was widely heralded as an absolutely “clean” solution to dependence on hydrocarbons.  But, today, loathing of wind farms grows with the wind-turbine blade death of every migrating bird.  Every community meeting about wind-power electrical distribution lines generates heat and hate.

So many solutions create their own problems.  Instead of mitigating the problems, though, people tend to blame problem-solvers who, in turn, become overly protective of their ideas and unwilling to modify the solution.

Ach!

No matter what, you cannot earn forgiveness for the unforgivable.

Some offenses are too hurtful, too brutal, too coarsely painful to warrant a shred of understanding, even a hint of defense. Knowing there’s no forgiveness, no way to ever earn it, no possibility of undoing the past, is the most painful thing. But it’s the most appropriate penalty for robbing someone of a lifetime of self-esteem.  It’s only a whisper of the pain, but it will serve, eventually, to elicit shrieks of pain, pleas for mercy that must never come, lest the brutality of the offense be lessened.

Some days you don’t want to go home.  You want to leave.  You want to drive and drive and drive until the promise of sleep in a bed in a motel in a godforsaken little town in the middle of nowhere is impossible to ignore. You just want something different.  Change.  You just want a different environment.  Even though you don’t expect to meet anyone with whom you have anything in common. Even though you know the highway offers nothing but loneliness and emptiness, you need it. You need a place to be empty and hollow and alone.

You need a place to wallow in self-pity or self-hatred or sorrow, something uglier and deeper than anything you’ve ever felt before. You know, deep in your belly or your soul or whatever it is that inhabits your brain and makes you worry about life and time and humanity and, even worse, inhumanity, that you need to try, try really hard, to break yourself into a thousand pieces so you can begin to try to put those pieces back together again, but this time, piece them together into something that matters.

Those are the blackest days, the days that might strangle what little there is left inside. Those are the days when a forgotten “good morning” or a letter gone unanswered can trigger the end of everything, the explosive eruptions that bring a lifetime crashing down into a throat too raw to call out for help, too far past forgiveness to ever hope for redemption.

Those times are vicious. That’s when tears are like molten glass, boiling and shredding skin as they slide down your cheeks, taking with them shredded pieces of your life and depositing them in an empty bowl that no one ever sees.

Even hugs, on those days, are lost. Even kisses and caresses and tender words are fragile and brittle.  Those days.  Those goddamned days.

Here’s what I think about concealed carry laws: if the Second Amendment protects my right to carry a pistol wherever I go, why can’t I also carry a nuclear weapon in the same places? Where do we draw the line between privates citizens’ “rights” and the rights of all citizens to feel safe from idiots who believe all manner of weapons should be carried in public places?

So, now I’m off to throw pottery and hope I don’t get into an escalating disagreement with someone who decides to “conceal carry” into the classroom.