History is within arm’s reach. That is to say, it’s much closer than we think. This morning, I was reminded of just how near we are to “the past” when I glanced online at an Associated Press (AP) regular feature entitled Today in History. The headline notes that the Wright Brothers’ first flight took place on this date, December 17, in 1903. What struck me was not how recently humans took to the skies. Rather, I was jolted by the fact that my father was roughly five months old at the time, having been born in July of that year. My father was considerably older when I was born, at fifty years of age, than most newborns’ fathers. It occurred to me the first flight took place just fifty years, minus a couple of months, before my birth. Time slips by, almost unnoticed, leaving breadcrumbs as evidence of its passing along the way: multiple wars, computers, space exploration, advanced telecommunications, television, and millions of other, less revolutionary, changes in our lives. When I consider time in the other direction, I wonder whether the past was a prelude to a positive future or just a preface to a grim epilogue.
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When voters elect leaders, are they abdicating their responsibilities to govern themselves? Are members of the electorate simply choosing rulers to make decisions they do not wish to make? Despite complex systems of check and balances that ostensibly are meant to protect populations from falling prey to authoritarians and dictators, the populace seems paralyzed when those systems fail to perform as expected. The U.S. Declaration of Independence asserts the Right of the People to act when governments fail them:
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government…
Yet the people, guaranteed the right of revolution, very rarely exercise that right, even when faced with tyranny. At what point is the agony of despotism sufficiently painful to warrant the exercise of that right? At what point are the risks associated with revolution deemed worth taking?
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Another chemotherapy visit to the oncologist today, a probable precursor to several more days of fatigue and general ennui. What better to do at this very moment, then, than describe a couple of scenes that flash by as I watch through closed eyes:
Light, in liquid form, seeps into his cell, illuminating the stone floor on which he is sitting. After an hour, light has deepened enough to cover his boots. After a full day, it has risen to his chin. An hour after that, he can keep it out of his mouth only by tilting his head backward. Moments later, he begins to cough as the light enters his lungs and causes him to react by choking. Suddenly, though, he is illuminated from within; no untoward negative reactions from his body. He feels like he can breathe better than ever before, as if the blue glow has purified his environment and cleansed him of the filthy residue of a lifetime chained in the bowels of a dank coal mine. Then, in a moment that passes far faster than a single second, he is gone. As is the cell…not just empty, but gone. No walls, no stone floor, nothing. Empty space. But an eerie, barely audible, echo remains in the space where he was; a sound like a breath way off, in the immeasurable distance. Enlightenment. Not a guru’s mystical insinuation. Not a secret pathway to an unknown place. Actual enlightenment. The same enlightenment first experienced before time began, before the universe expressed itself from its invisible primordiality.
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Earsplitting silence, interrupted by sounds so soft the ground vibrates and rolls in waves, fills the emptiness like an orchestra of dead musicians. Leaves, clinging to the trees in a desperate attempt to avoid plunging to the forest floor, shake in anticipation of ferocious winds shredding the atmosphere and filling the air with swirling ribbons of menacing dust. Watching from the entrance to a cave, I watch deer and raccoons—their eyes wide with terror—bolt across a meadow, fleeing what must seem, to them, like the personification of Mother Nature’s irrational rage. I share their fear. And their pain. It courses through my veins like molten lava, searing every cell in my body. Escape is impossible, but surrender promises an experience a thousand times worse; and twice as unlikely as freedom.
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I could write for days and end up with swill of equal quality, even after turning it all over to a team of professional editors. You can’t make a silk purse out of sour buttermilk sullied with the corpses of rotting flies.
