Atonement
Los Angeles, CA May 31, 2020
It is bigger than everything and anything, what is going on. No question mark. On this beautiful Monday morning I sit in my dining room, my view an expanse of green and sunlight pouring in from the east. A spiderweb glistens, its threads loose, wavy, the air so clear I see gnats eluding it. We have so many hummingbirds this year, and I think they are the air's dolphins darting friendly so much that is good to sip. I'm thinking about atonement and whether this country our country will have the strength to work together as a collective to atone for the brutality upon which we were founded and continued through centuries all the way up to now with children in cages, the disabled having to beg for help, the elderly left to die alone, the dead bodies of children piling up, the dead bodies of black people piling up, the healers in dirty masks. Yet so much bounty. This country taken from those that lived here for thousands of years and then built on the backs of the enslaved. The delusion that is the American dream. The vast inequality. Age-old. The center cannot hold. There is something beyond intense watching hordes of young people break through glass only to grab boxes of shoes and luxury bags. The backs of their heads, their heads in hoodies. I can't get the white girl with the skinny legs and pink hair out of my head. Skateboards used to smash windows. The tank rolling down the street of pristine houses, men in riot gear hanging off, headed to where? I saw a man with a box on his shoulders, clothes wrapped in plastic dropping out of it as he ran while others watched. So much heaviness and anger and wildness in the scrawls of letters across buildings. So much desperation. How paltry in comparison to the plights of other countries, other peoples. Or is it?
The beauty of those who swept the glass and scrubbed away the ugliness. The Korean councilman, the Orthodox Jewish rabbi, the teenaged girl, the black man.
I want to write something funny. Something absurd. Something to tell the truth. Something to evade the truth.