Battles and Bells

We are a battle-weary people. At least I am a battle-weary person.

We battle traffic, rude store clerks and customers, arrogant cops, cable companies, cell phone agents.

We battle the incompetence of politicians, the hypocrisy of the religious, the indifference of employers, the jealousy of co-workers, the betrayal of lovers, the insolence of students.

These battles wear us down, exhaust us, make us cynical and bad-tempered. We lose something of ourselves in every battle we wage or endure. Sometimes it’s something irretrievable. Humility. Understanding. A part of our soul. A slice of our heart. A function of our thinking that keeps us human.

The battles, the wars, our American military are involved in across the world are often forgotten and ignored by most of us. We don’t really follow them. But we are part of those battles, too. As Americans, we are represented in those wars. And there is something terribly diminishing about them for all of us, whether we acknowledge it or not.

A nation in constant battle, within and without, weakens and slackens into dishonor and humiliation.

The savage American Civil War taught us little. We killed more than 600,000 of our own people, often brothers against brothers, families against families, friends against friends. And that was just soldiers. Some historians say we lost 2% of our population from that war, including diseases, injuries, and illnesses to civilians caused by it. That would be equivalent to 6 million Americans dying today.

And yet, today, we get closer and closer to civil war in this country. Our political system is not a functioning part of our government. It is a corrupted, unjust system of cronyism, greed, and graceless, clumsy incompetence.

Poet laureate, Robert Pinsky, has said that the idea of justice is going dead in us. Laws are toyed with, twisted into meaninglessness, or just flat out ignored by those charged with enforcing them.

Our police forces have become thoroughly militarized. They seem to operate with a war zone mentality that sees suspects as enemies to be eliminated without the chance to be proven innocent. Or even if they have committed a crime they are tried and judged on the spot and in far too many instances shot and killed.

Our justice system, including our courts and even the Supreme Court, have become politically tainted with partisan politics. It is no longer about selecting brilliant candidates of high character and fairmindedness. Now it’s just finding justices who will do the bidding of a president or support a political party’s narrow agenda.

There is a beautiful poem from poet and professor, Martín Espada, that captures a hope that our battles might mean something, might turn into usefulness. He writes about war, but I think it applies to all battles:

“Listen to the bells in the ruins

Of a city where children gathered copper shells like beach glass,

And the copper boiled in the foundry, and the bell born

In the foundry says: I was born of bullets, but now I sing

Of a world where bullets melt into bells.”

If only that could be the result of all our battles, where our rage and hate and wrangling and killing is at last melted into the refinement of music. Perhaps then, our battles would, if not end, at least have a purpose.

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The Unclad Soul

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