I like to pretend that writing is my chance to exhale the
world and the war, the death of media and democracy’s downfall, pretend that I
can overlook the LA smog and the sadness and what tries to grab my attention on
the street. When I’m writing my goal is to somehow dip sweetly into a little downtime
where I can ignore the couple eating dinner at the 7/11—two greasy hot dogs
that had been turning on the electric toaster grill all day—and ignore the
short man in the blue jacket and the black baseball cap dropped off by the
coyote he’s indebted to, even as he sits there on the corner of Reseda, not
sure what town he’s in, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but sell
mangos and strawberries and large sacks of oranges until his master returns and
the $7,000 dollars he owes for the trip across the border is paid off. I try to
take my mind far away from Washington D.C. because, after all, I really am far away from the
scandal and the blood that is dripping from the hands of each and every one of
those men and women who are not representing Democracy or America’s
citizens. I like to think writing is my meditation, a time I can clear my mind
of most everything.
Then, as I begin to write about love or nature, voices like
the one of Eduardo Galeano break through somehow and I begin digressing from this
meditation to the tail end of the interview I caught on Democracy Now!. On the
program Eduardo Galeano wanted us to imagine what it would be like if half a
million Americans, most of them women and children had been killed by foreign
invaders. It would take “millenniums,” he said to forget what occurred. Well,
in Iraq,
we have killed nearly half a million people. Women and children. Yet here in
the U.S.,
we routinely read the numbers of the dead and move on to the Metro section.
Galeano ended the program answering a question about the role of the American
people in the world today. “What should be their role, as distinct from the
government’s?” he was asked. Galeano responded, “It would help to understand
that the world is much more than the U.S. I mean, this is a very
important country, indeed. But we are all important. We are all able to say
something that deserves to be heard.”
And then I realize that this is why I write. No matter how
hard I try, I can’t seem to forget the couple at the 7/11, or the indentured
human being on the corner selling oranges. And I can’t ignore the smog in Los Angeles or the scandals and lies coming from Washington. I cherish
the meaningful debate that once made up this Democracy and allowed for outrage
and tough questions both in times of war and peace. So for now, I have to just
keep doing what it is I seem to be unable to stop doing. Does anyone have any
other suggestions for meditation?
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