A MOTHERLESS CHILD
They Shoot Horses, Don´They ?
As long as I was younger, healthier and more focused I could cope with working in emotionally deplorable conditions. As long as we drowned ourselves in work, we fled the frightening pauses or rests that forced us into merciless reflections on what we saw in front of our eyes: the devastating suffering and the limitless evil or idiocy which caused it and realized that our own lifestyle was one of the principle reasons.
No, not by living la vida loca in Bel Air but a ordinary white collar or blue collar lives in reasonable modesty and yet being a major contributor to the uneven distributation wealth globally or domestecically by shutting up while trying to live our unpetentious little lives and I guess have returned there.
By working hard we had no energy or even, as we saw it, any time to be philosophical slackers trying to find a meaning of the human misery and hardships we dealt with with jaws tightly shut and brains timed out.
In 1969, shortly before entering adult life, I saw a film by Sidney Pollack, starring a stunning Jane Fonda, depicting a struggle for life destined to fail. Old horses are being shot. What about people who do not fit in, never succeeds, face all thinkable, obstacles, insults and are being dispised or in one another ignored, be it in an impoversihed L.A. rundown area or the grotesque suburban Stalinistic overly organized ghettos of Stockholm ? The public sector hoovers in the back of all stages in your life from craddle to grave. It is regarded as welfarish and safe. It is. Love your public sector ! Your relatives are probably not around because of social and political "progress".
In Brazil, in Indonesia, in Guatemala and Honduras they do not shoot the horses. The shoot the street children. With great discipline and planning. Most children are already worn out, perpetually high on smelling intoxicating substances, moonshine alcohol or heavy drugs. In central Africa and Nigeria they shoot ten year old soldiers, abducted from their homes to become warriors in some confused wayward local ”army” with no ideals and no agenda except from killing, robbing and abusing in ways I will not describe here.
The Miracle of Love
Many of us who once were working the minefields cannot be pitied. We made our choice, But we often end up very lonely. There is no ”cameraderie” of former relief or protection workers. It seems absurd to meet and retell the horrors and pat each other´s shoulders. Don´t be so humble”, Golda Meir once told a diplomat, ”you aren´t that great !! ” That´s a toché if I ever heard one....
And yet I see a new generation of young people genuinely concerned, committed, full of energy to combat the unbearable, displacing us who feel lost and wearied. One thing has become evident to me in my life.
Where there is utter despair there also is the opposite. The well does not run dry. Ever.
Some horses are allowed to die on their own. Thank God !
Thank you to all of you who are not faint of heart and have the courage, the will and the intelligence to understand and to go on assisting, each according to her or his capability and living conditions, ,although there are no rewards. Only the possibility to make a great choice while you are walking this earth...
Douglas
2014
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