Ben from Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream for TrueMajority.org
First of all – you can help right NOW by text message the word HAITI on your mobile phone to 25383 to make a $5 donation via the International Rescue Committee.
Second of all, I feel so helpless. I want to be there digging, or passing out bottles of water, or cleaning porta-potties or SOMETHING… anything to help.
I suppose this is a terribly ignorant point of view, but I’m following the world’s response – in particular the United State’s.
I’m thinking if EVER there were a *GOOD* reason to invade a country, this is it.
I mean we can walk all over Afghanistan and Pakistan. We tore Iraq apart at the seams. But the 82nd Airborne has to circle the island for five hours? Aid workers are backed up at the airport? What the hell? You know?
We’re the USA for Christ’s sake. With all our wealth, and all our patriotism and flag waving THIS is best we can do???
Send in the Marines. Take this shit over man. Provide security. Get water, food, shelter, sanatation, and security where it is needed, NOW, before it is too late.
Dig them out. Secure the perimeter. Protect the weak and the innocent. Get it together and then get the hell out.
Flight To Cyangugu, Rwanda Kamembe Airport Flying over Bukavu, DRC
I made a trip to Africa recently. I work in technology an engineer and network manager for a humanitarian organization with a large, well funded program in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I was sent to spend a week in Bukavu helping to set-up some IT equipment and do some troubleshooting.
I’ve been on the African continent a few times – in the 1990′s working as a touring musician I visited Egypt, Morocco, and Kenya – which was as far south as I had ever been. The most powerful impact of this trip, with the exception of the friendships I made in Bukavu, was my layover in Rwanda.
The trip from Bukavu back to Rwanda involved a 45 minuite “puddle-jumper” flight from Cyangugu Kamembe airport on the DRC border to Kigali. It was a short flight, but over the most intensely beautiful country I have ever seen. My seat mate was also employed by an NGO and we decided that we’d spend our afternoon Kigali layover visiting the Kigali Genocide Memorial. My seat-mate Laeticia was the one who told me about the history of the genocide and pointed out Romeo Dallaire’s book, Shake Hands with the Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda
which I purchased from the gift shop after the tour.
Many people don’t know about the genocide in Rwanda. As the world watched a different tragedy unfold in the former Yugoslavia; and questioned whether or not O.J. Simpson’s hands fit the bloody glove – A million people were brutally slaughtered in an organized wave of death based on nothing more than their identity as a Tutsi or Hutu moderate. The world didn’t pay much attention.
It is hard to explain what happened in the scope of a sentence or two, but basically humanity went nuts. Rwanda had a division along ethnic lines – something that was encouraged and enforced during Rwanda’s colonial occupation by Belgium. Great hatred developed between the Tutsi (the favored, the ones given high positions and status) and the Hutus (the common masses, farmers, and workers). In the late 50′s and into the early 60′s, just five years or so before Rwanda gained full independence, the Tutsi monarchy was eventually driven from power and exiled themselves in the neighboring countries of Zaire (DR Congo), Uganda, Burundi and Tanzania. Rwanda’s history into the 1990′s was one of various factions – Hutu moderate government forces, Exiled Rwandan Tutsi Forces that had mobilized outside the country, and internal Hutu extremists who held high contempt and hatred for all Tutsis and Hutu moderates. As the tensions and political power began to mobilize and strengthen between these groups, a United Nations force was installed to keep the peace. The figurehead of the force was Canadian Lt. General Romeo Dallaire, who has written a book (now a movie ) about his experiences. Essentially Dallaire failed in his mission. While signs of an impending tragedy echoed across the desks of the most powerful nations in the world, they were ignored. Dallaire did the best he could do with what he had – and I believe that for that he is a hero. Unfortunately he was not given enough resources to prevent the slaughter of nearly one million Tutsi and Hutu moderates by rogue government forces and the extremist Interhamwe over the next few weeks.
Visiting the memorial is tough. Rooms filled with cases of bones, shoes, clothing, identification, photographs and personal effects stand to remind of what happened here in 1994. 1994. Another area serves the memory of other genocides such as those in Cambodia, Bosnia and Nazi Germany in World War II. Clearly we never learned our lesson. Viewing the small remains of a child whose skull was fractured from the blow of the back of a machete is not something one can soon forget. While I’m no Romeo Dallaire, sometimes the silence is too loud even for me.
Why am I blathering on about all this? I guess it is because I know that this ethnic genocide continues in parts of central Africa. I know that armed militias control and wage war over various mineral resources in the DRC of gold and coltan. Many people starve. There is widespread lawlessness and gang rape by armed militias is a daily occurrence both women and men experience on a regular basis. Large masses of people are constantly uprooted and must move due to the conflicts. This stuff keeps me up at night.
I watched a documentary of General Dallaire – and he spoke of his post traumatic stress and suicidality after returning home. He said the silence became so loud. He spoke of the persistence of horrific visions of corpses and the stench of death and the feelings of helplessness and failure.
Dallaire has spoken of his faith. It remains difficult for me to believe in a god who would sit by and let all these things happen – in the same way it is difficult for me to believe in a government or even a planet that could sit by and let these things happen. They say 26,000 children die of starvation every day. Why would a god who could fix that and feed them, not? Why would he let a young child or infant watch his parent be shot or machete’d to death – before being raped and murdered herself? How does the god of little children I was taught to believe in stand by and watch that happen?
Human beings are capable of some awful things. It doesn’t seem to require any mental illness to me. Perhaps Manson and Bundy were mentally ill – antisocial, sociopathic, incapable of remorse or empathy. But surely not every genocidaire involved in the muder of a million Rwandese fit the DSM category for antisocial sociopathy – (any more than those German people who were complicit in the extermination of 6 times as many Jews murdered in the Nazi Holocaust). I think people who “know” they are right, and are just that sure of themselves are dangerous. This is what happens when we go so fully into the us and them mentality. This is what happens when we so strongly identify as right or left. When we identify as groups and stop identifying as individuals – we start to lose our humanity. When our humanity is gone, the most horrible shit happens.
(I’d like to add, this advice to his 12 year old son could just as well apply to a daughter on becoming a woman)
“Letter to the son” by Rudyard Kipling
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired from waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dream – and not make dreams your master;
If you can think – and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build ‘em up with worn-out tools;
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings – nor loose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run:
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!
I’ve posted this before. I keep returning to it – and it never fails to remind me how deep and complex we are. It is so easy to trivialize, to label, to stereotype… and we forget that each of us was once somebody’s child. We’re not cartoons. We’re not liberals and conservatives. Inside each of us lives a child who longs to be understood.
Years ago when I first met my wife, she gave me a copy of a beautiful story.
I was anxious to share everything there was to share about myself – and I wanted her to know everything about me – both the good and the bad.
We spoke about things like regret and we also spoke about forgiveness. We spoke about what it means to lose yourself and lose your way.
I long for a community like the one in this story. I long for love and support of those who remind me when I’ve lost my way and help me find the real me whom I forgot.
How many of us could benefit from hearing our song sung to us when we’ve lost our way? How many of us sometimes need to be reminded who we truly are?
The Song of A Life
When a woman in a certain African tribe knows she is pregnant, she
goes out into the wilderness with a few friends and together they pray
and meditate until they hear the song of the child.They recognize that every soul has its own vibration that expresses
its unique flavor and purpose.When the women attune to the song, they sing it out loud. Then they
return to the tribe and teach it to everyone else.When the child is born, the community gathers and sings the child’s
song to him or her. Later, when the child enters education, the village
gathers and chants the child’s song.When the child passes through the initiation to adulthood, the
people again come together and sing. At the time of marriage, the person
hears his or her song.Finally, when the soul is about to pass from this world, the family
and friends gather at the person’s bed, just as they did at their birth,
and they sing the person to the next life.In the African tribe, there is one other occasion upon which the
villagers sing to the child.If at any time during his or her life, the person commits a crime or
aberrant social act, the individual is called to the center of the
village and the people in the community form a circle around them.
Then they sing their song to them.The tribe recognizes that the correction for antisocial behavior is not
punishment; it is love and the remembrance of identity. When you
recognize your own song, you have no desire or need to do anything that
would hurt another.A friend is someone who knows your song and sings it to you when
you have forgotten it.Those who love you are not fooled by mistakes you have made or
dark images you hold about yourself.They remember your beauty when you feel ugly; your wholeness
when you are broken; your innocence when you feel guilty; and your
purpose when you are confused.You may not have grown up in an African tribe that sings your song
to you at crucial life transitions, but life is always reminding you when
you are in tune with yourself and when you are not.When you feel good, what you are doing matches your song, and
when you feel awful, it doesn’t.
- Author Unknown
I’ve almost never spoken about it. I certainly never spoke about it publicly.
Personally, that day was a mile-marker. It marked the beginning of a massive spiral downward. My life hit it’s lowest point ever nearly a year and many substantial events later. I gave up – on myself and everybody else too… and I really fucked my life up. I don’t know if I can blame that day alone – but it is an irrevocable part of the whole story to be sure.
I was here, in Manhattan, and watched it from the window of my apartment. My wife watched too, saw them fall, from her rooftop, though back in 2001 – though she and I had yet to meet.
I slept in that morning, on the pull-out bed Jennifer Convertibles leather sofa that filled most of my studio apartment, 49B.
I heard sirens pass by outside – not an unfamiliar sound. They didn’t stop and kept going, and going until I abandoned my cozy bed and got up to look out the window and take a leak.
I didn’t see anything right away, but checked my email and saw an ABC Breaking News Alert in my inbox. “Small plane may have flown into World Trade Center…”
I stood on my tub and looked out the bathroom window where I could get a good sight line downtown. I could see plumes of smoke rising.
I flipped on the TV, and by then the second one had hit.
I alternately paced back and forth from the TV to my bathroom window.
I saw the first one fall on live TV.
The next day, Wednesday, I walked down as far as they’d let me and stood with crowds and we applauded the crews exiting the site.
We smelled that smell together. I won’t even try to describe it. It lingered for weeks maybe months. Sometimes I still smell it.
- Photo: Charley and friends at Christmas Party. Windows on the World, World Trade Center Tower One, Top Floor.
Musicians in the subway are pretty common. I see them every day. Some are impressive, some not.
Last night I was leaving the gym after an especially tiring workout. My legs felt like rubber and I just didn’t feel like going down into the hot subway right away – so I caught an uptown M104 and rode it cross town and up to Columbus Circle where I caught the A train.
As I descended down to the platform, I heard singing. I thought it was a woman singing tunes by The Temptations. Often singers and performers will sing or play to backing tracks blasting from boom boxes or battery powered amps. They nearly always sing through a microphone of some sort. I usually listen for a minute and go through my usually critiques: Are they in tune and singing in the right key? Do they know the song? Is there anything different or unusual about their style?
There was something that captured my interest last night. As I looked across the platform to the other side I scanned the Friday night crowd to catch a glimpse. I couldn’t seem to find her – although I did seem to locate the direction of the sound in the large underground echo chamber that is the station at Columbus Circle.
As I looked closer I saw an old man sitting on the wooden benches, mouth moving in time to the music and I realized he was the source of the music. He completely blended in with the crowd. He sat in the bench spread legged with his hands on his knees and sang the tunes with the the background tracks.
He sang the tunes spot on and then riffed around the melody. When the tracks stopped he kept singing. He’d go right into the next song when it started. He had no microphone – so the vocal was all him. Just that old man sitting on the bench completely filling that huge underground space with the the power of his voice and his love of the music.
My train came and I left. My parting thought was how utterly natural he was. Genuine. No hype. No glitter. No effects.
Just an old man sitting on a bench doing what he was born to do.
The Tables Turned by William Wordsworth
Up! up! my Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely you’ll grow double:
Up! up! my Friend, and clear your looks;
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain’s head,
A freshening lustre mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! ’tis a dull and endless strife:
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music! on my life,
There’s more of wisdom in it.
And hark! how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless–
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:–
We murder to dissect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
– William Wordsworth
