Another Mourning After
Icy Grief
I didn’t want to write.
Not in the immediacy of the here and now. Not amidst what a local columnist called “a sea of tweets and posts [that] isn’t always wrong. But…always hyperventilating.”
But here and now is where we have landed. And there truly is no looking away.
After putting lament aside in favor of joy over the holidays, and then guard-railing it into a monthly bullet-listing of stockpiled sadnesses, I thought I was responsibly protecting myself from the froth, from overreaction, reaction for reaction’s sake, from interpretation without evidence. But so often, reading history or paying attention to the world beyond our doorstep, we cry out at “man’s inhumanity to man” as if terrible conditions, decisions to act with violence, or brutal dismissals of others only exist in some “then” or “there,” not now, not here.
“Man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn”
Robert Burns, 1784
Change “thousands” to “millions” and advance the calendar to twenty-first century America. Alas, it is here and now.
Worse is that while we hurt alongside the poor, powerless, abused, attacked, and innocent, many millions of others defend, excuse, dismiss, obfuscate or otherize.
Man’s inhumanity.
I lament the cruelty, the violence, the shameful, murderous posturing.
I lament the silence of cowardice — all those corporations, the wealthy, the elected - empowereds who express no conscience of their own, but wait for others to stick a neck out, in the hopes they won’t have to.
I lament the bubbles that enable people to pretend distant evil can’t touch them.
Man’s inhumanity. We can’t escape it.
Where is that “good man with a gun” of which so many have spoken?
Man’s inhumanity.
Where are “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses longing to breathe free”?1
Man’s inhumanity.
I do not live in Minneapolis. Or Bondi Beach. Or Darfur. It isn’t necessary to be “there” to care, to mourn, to lament. Though it may seem easier to throw up our hands at Man’s inhumanity, it’s important to acknowledge and work to overcome it.
Burns wrote:
“Many and sharp the num’rous ills
Inwoven with our frame!
More pointed still we make ourselves,
Regret, remorse, and shame!
And man, whoe heav’n-erected face
The smiles of love adorn,
Man’s inhumanity to man
Make countless thousands mourn!
But we are Man. We are humanity, and because of that we have the capacity to love. Humanity means care, dignity. It is human to share, to help, to offer, to consider, to take one small step in another’s shoes.
I lament in these mourning days, and hope we might remember — there is no humanity without us.
Read Burns’ full poem.
Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” on the pedestal of our Statue of Liberty