Page 17 - Dark Matter Women Witnessing

thinking template of the Nazis’ ‘final solution’, identical to the justification of every

genocide. Are humans the host for greed? Is greed the intermediate host for Death?

Just as each life has its personal snapshots of mayhem and suffering, every era has its

wars, it seems, and its public icons of madness. I was born after the concentration

camps with their emaciated prisoners in striped pajamas; after the boxcars and the

impossible mounds of children’s shoes; after the mushroom clouds and the indelible,

scorched shadows etched onto the sidewalks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In elementary

school, in the 1950’s, we used to practice ‘drop drills’ – a sudden shout from the teacher

to DROP! and we’d throw down our pencils and dive under our desks, covering our

heads with our hands. It was a surreal enactment of the illusion of Western invincibility,

as if our spindly arms and a piece of Formica could protect us from an atomic bomb. It

reinforced what we already intuitively knew: that, like everyone and everything else, we,

too were expendable. At best, the adults in our lives would shout a warning, but it was

up to us children to protect ourselves. The fact of nuclear weapons meant that, like us,

the future was expendable. By the early 1960’s, this sent us, like lemmings, over the

edge of our known world, in search of a better way. Our drugged hedonism and political

fury gave momentary expression to our desperate longing (and there are some beautiful

experiments that have taken root). Yet, fifty years on, we are still running, faster than

ever. Running away, always running way. But what are we running toward?

I came of age during the Viet Nam war, watching Watergate on TV at dinnertime,

stoned, with my roommates, the whole surreal drama unfolding as if real-time war and

Nixon’s crumbling presidency were just another sitcom. For me, the overarching image

of that time was Kim Phuc, the napalmed girl running toward us, naked and screaming,

with outstretched arms. Now we have Alan Kurdi, the drowned toddler from Syria who

washed up on a Turkish beach.

In the media, human suffering, though terrible, is nonetheless privileged over the

suffering of the natural world. Images of the devastated Earth and her beleaguered

animals are comparatively few and hidden, reinforcing the illusion that we are separate.

One must look more deeply to get to the truth. Few among us can escape the expanding

library of horror lodged in our minds, whose images we can play at will like a slideshow.

Each one is unbearable. With each one I think, That does it! That toddler, those baby

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