What Else Can be Said?

In her searing memoir, “Hope Against Hope,” Nadezhda Mandelstam wrote, “I decided it is better to scream.” Then she wrote, “Silence is the real crime against humanity.”

She knew something about pain, horror, death. Her husband, a gifted poet, suffered endless persecution under Stalin. He died on his way to the Siberian gulag, humiliated and alone in the cold. She tells his story of sorrow in her memoir.

After this week’s school murders in Santa Fe, Texas, even screaming seems useless. And though silence, too, is no solution, and worse, very well a crime in the face of so much bloodshed, one is nevertheless left in feelings of stone silence.

What else can be said?

We’re all tired of the empty religious jumble. Prayers and accepting God’s Will and all of that. Doesn’t work for me. It blasphemes anyone’s true faith.

Our politicians have lost all sense of reality. They live in some cocoon of their own making, hiding from these horrific, senseless, obscene killings. They justify their inaction with the most outrageous excuses. Blame is everywhere and on everything and everyone but them.

Their denials used to infuriate me. Now they just float in the air like dark exhaust from an old car that needs an oil change. They chafe and gag me.

I know a little of what is going on in the homes of the dead. I have been with families in the midst of unexpected, petrifying tragedy. At times, I can close my eyes and return to those scenes. You never forget them. In those moments I can hear the crying. I feel the enormous loss and the dismay. There is a heaviness to it that weighs you down, exhausts you. I remember the lonely walk to the graves. None of the victims come back from the grave. The permanence of it stuns and saddens.

What can be said?

The stories being told now of the victims are both touching and agonizing. Kids preparing for graduation. Kids excited about summer. Athletes, honor students, solid young people arriving to art class unaware of the coming shattering of their beautiful lives. Two teachers among them, one working two jobs to care for her ill husband. And others left wounded, some of them perhaps dealing with permanent physical damage.

The waste of it all is overwhelming.

The numbing talk goes on. Politics. Guns. Greed. The NRA. And while that all whirls around in usual useless circles with no end, the families of the victims are left in their grief. These are real people with their hearts destroyed. Their dreams for their teenagers ended.

Do we as a nation even understand that? Can we get close enough to that sorrow to find, as a people, a way to comprehend where we are in our humanity. What is America anymore, anyway?

I would scream if I thought it would do any good. But the truth is, I can’t even do that. Silence submerges me in its depths. I’m trying to see light above me to find my way to the surface. The distance though seems impossible to manage.

What else can be said?

© 2018 Timothy Moody