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Thursday, April 6, 2006
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quiet catalyst.
Despair is a near-silent thing.
It may lurk behind the noisy clatter of anger or the white-hot hum of rage or even the muted moans of grief, but it makes no sound of its own.
Despair is where hope does not go, where air and colour and light drain away, where crying seems futile because no one hears or sees or cares.
Despair is everywhere you look on any given day, but no one discusses it, because what would be the point? How do you describe what it means to be empty, when you don't even have words?
I used to believe that anger was the catalyst behind much of the conflict in our world, but my opinion is beginning to shift. Anger certainly can and does breed discord, but it can also lead us toward positive action. Anger based on malevolence is destructive, but anger based on the right kind of indignation can save lives.
This used to cause me no end of confusion. How could any emotion go in such completely different directions under the same moniker? I held as much disdain for people with the right kind of furious conviction as I did for bullies and bastards, because I just couldn't fathom how the two sides of the coin would manage to stay seperate forever.
Well, they can. The difference, however, is that righteous anger can only come from a place of love and justice, whereas virulent anger comes from fury and pain.
Both kinds of anger can be incredibly motivating.
But despair?
Despair is paralysis.
Not literally, of course. You can live a whole life with despair. You can work your job, raise your family, conduct your relationships, and grow to a ripe old age... it won't stop you from living. It just fades and muddies the colour of life into an inexplicable sort of gray and makes it seem like you control nothing and have nothing and can reach for nothing and can hope for nothing.
And then it gives birth to conflict.
Maybe that seems ironic. It is, really. How could emptiness breed anything but emptiness?
But since nature abhors a vacuum, it must be filled with something. And thus we become empty and full all at once, in a hideously contradictory sort of way.
Despair lives well with anger. Despair lives well with hate. Despair lives well with sadness. Despair lives well with jealousy. Despair lives well with almost anything negative, because then all it has to do is provide the end of the rope. You know the rope -- the thing that people get to the end of?
I've heard that phrase more times than I can count. "I just got to the end of my rope."
People offer that rope end as the justification for everything from substance abuse to child abuse to petty crime to cold-blooded murder. And that's what despair does. It makes you think that good is impossible. It makes you believe that your worst choices are inevitable. It numbs you to the consquences. It informs your conscience that you have absolutely nothing to lose.
And from nations right on down to neighbours, I believe that this is our enemy and our disease. Not anger, not desperation, not hate -- though they bear their own casualties -- but stone-cold despair.
You can see it in the faces of children beaten and forced to become murderers, from the child militia of Nepal to the youngest members of the Klu Klux Klan. You can see it in the bruised eyes of men in prison who went from bearing wounds to creating them, from tripping over bottles to draining them dry. You can see it in the grainy security-camera footage of suicide bombers, wide-eyed and faithful and already gone. You can see it in the bowed heads of the prisoners of war whose clothing is still stained with the blood of their foes. You can see it in the faces of mothers who are forced to mutilate their daughters according to traditions that victimized them first. You can see it in the hunger-sharpened cheekbones of Sudanese refugees, denied homes, food, dignity, and in the end, their lives. You could see it in the faces of Katrina victims, lined up in front of the SuperDome, being called poor and ignorant and violent by people who had the luxury of watching it happen on television.
Really, just turn on the news. Or go downtown. Or walk into a school. Or a mall.
It's everywhere. People live and die by their despair on a daily basis.
And every time we turn our back on those faces, we allow it to root more deeply into our society. Every time we assume there is no solution, no effort big enough, we abandon more lives to the shadowy chasm. Every time we choose to let our fear define what we can give or do, we take a little of that despair into our own lives.
This is where I believe the most true, active, effective activism finds genesis: we have to see what is empty in people before we can recognize how to best care for them. We have to see the source of their emptiness. And we have to see what they have attempted to fill that space with themselves, no matter how ugly those contents might be.
Only then you can begin to nourish those spaces, instead of letting them lie fallow.
Or, of course, you can choose not to act, and grow a little more empty yourself.
I don't know what will work in every circumstance. All I know is that we have to start trying to heal the roots of despair, rather than just playing cleanup with the aftermath.
Because evil flourishes when good people do nothing -- and when people decide that there is nothing good they can do.
12:54:14 AM 
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© Copyright
2006
Meg Fowler.
Last update:
5/1/06; 1:35:48 AM. |
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it is a very sad thing that nowadays, there is so little useless information. ~ oscar wilde today's ooh! item:
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