Tonight
An old friend of mine had a bad experience. He’s eighty. He’s lonely depressed and wealthier than what’s probably good for him. He wanted to show me how much he cared about what I thought of him. He lives in a fantasy of days gone by and hungers for those “good old days”….
I stopped drinking alcohol over twenty years ago. I stopped because I understood that I drank whiskey and scotch and rum because I wanted the pain to stop. I drank because I was self-medicating and longed for a silence.
I’ve had the sinew and meat of my soul torn from me in a war that brought only pain and sorrow to everyone around me. I killed people because it was my duty. I believed in justice and compassion and the devastation of my practice was rivulets of blood soaking into dank clay.
Because it was my job.
I didn’t have to “think”, my commanders told me how to think and what to think. Half naked burning women and children ran through the jungle while blood spilled from their ears as thebombs and gunfire jarred us to the foundations of our being. Wide-eyed children splashed with the gelled gasoline of invisible retribution riding on wisps of clouds over a canopy of dark leaves. A brilliant flash and molten messengers of doom sprayed across the cargo cabin igniting everything in their path. And I was saved by a Khmer farmer whose family had been exterminated in the name of peace.
I’m sorry if you think I’m weak and gutless. I cried like a child….many times.
My friend Bill cried for me.
But I never gave up; it’s not in me. I persevered through hell and back and when my body my circulatory system collapsed and blood streamed down my spinal column and I lost my mobility and my eye sight, I didn’t give up….
I don’t give up. I believe that only the actions of one human being called upon to act in the name of peace and justice must stand against the darkness.
No rationalization of the stench of death on my hands, no solace for the throbbing pain of a soul silenced without reason.
I’ve clenched fire in my fists and I’ve bitten the throat of pain in a dying man, slain for the promise of justice and meaning. I’ve watched as the light of eternity ebbed from the soul of a child. I can’t embrace your lies and your fantasy any more….
You will believe whatever you want to believe…whatever sober realization you embrace as your vision.
Your “system” and your lies are counterfeit substitutes for your humanity.
And I won’t surrender my soul to your vacuous temerity. You have the capacity to ignore suffering and champion greed and prosperity at any price.
You have ceased to be human, and in your choice to deny your nature you become my enemy.
I will turn the weapons of war upon you. It is your justice and your morality not mine.
You’ve surrendered your mind to a merchants dream and disavowed your partnership with life.
I took Bill away from the bar; I drove his monument to prosperity away from the leering superciliousness of the disingenuous and the fraud of respect that cash can buy. I feared for Bill and I feared for anyone meeting a drunken madman hurtling down the highway on an alcohol-induced journey to self-destruction.
I drove his car to my apartment building and tried to placate him with promises of care and companionship. I couldn’t allow him to take the keys and wield his juggernaut down a highway he couldn’t even see.
I drove ten miles. I haven’t driven a car for decades, but it’s something you don’t forget and it’s something you bring every sense every awareness too so that you don’t endanger anyone, so that you preserve the potential of everyone who shares this space….
I could have tricked Bill, told him I lost his keys or that we were lost in a jungle of concrete and mortar far from the cacophony of repressed ambition and unrealized desire….
But it’s not my “right” to take another man’s freedom away from him.
I called the police, and told them that a drunken man was semi-comatose in the back seat of a Lincoln Continental in my parking lot, and I feared that if I let him go, he and some innocent would pay the price.
I was berated and threatened by the police for having driven without a license. I was accused of drunken disorderly conduct and had the handcuffs slammed around my wrists. I was treated as a criminal. I had safely driven to my residence and had the help of three bouncers to get Bill into the car and asked many times and tested in an off-hand kind of way if I was sober enough to drive when I left the bar with Bill in the back seat.
No one came to harm. And yet the message was that I had a greater responsibility to the form and letter of the “law” than I had to my friend or those who’d be potential victims to his impairment.
It may be longing for a different meter of justice, it may be a wish for the triumph of common sense over the metric of formula thinking, but in years gone by, a policeman would have taken Bill’s keys and made sure his vehicle was secure….
There was no reason, there was no exercise of better judgment, merely the capitalization of a circumstance that garnered a cop an arrest and an exercise of rote rationalization with an unconscious man and an old cripple who tried to address the situation….
Our “justice” is a lie, our “social fabric” a pretence to victimize those who put faith and “stock” in reasoned action.
Our “system” demands victims and our “justice” is perverse.
If I have the opportunity to wreck vengeance on these puppets of corruption I will. And I will no longer lament the child cut down by mindless greed and disinterested objectivity. Our laws no longer serve the interests of the whole; they serve the petty scuffling affectation of the incompetent.
Don’t bother penning a reply; I’ve ceased to care.
We are living in the throes of a lie and sudden violent communion with the hereafter is the grail of the enthusiastically complacent.
