Burial of the Living
I write this on the second anniversary of the Great Purge of 2009 when I was forcibly evicted from my home and family of 15+ years, having devoted virtually every dram of my energies for the betterment of that ungrateful family and pumped virtually every penny of the $200,000+ I ever earned during those 15+ wasted years into that house.
A month later to the day, I lost my job and therein begins a mere anecdote, a simple little overlooked footnote of the real tale of the Real America, the one Sarah Palin will never tell you about, the Real America that has begun the slow process of burying the living, Corporate America clutching that golden shovel to begun the ground breaking ceremony of the interment of Working America.
We have come not to praise Jurassicpork but to bury him and those he holds dear so the world can get on with its getting and spending and not have to listen to his endless tirades about poverty both personal and collective. God, won't he shut the fuck up?! the world seems to say every time I put fingers to keyboard or raise my embittered voice in agony.
It is now exactly 23 months since I have last held a job, O Lord, and after 31 years in the workforce I am now officially an unemployable dinosaur because I am now suddenly not experienced enough, educated enough, because my teeth aren't white enough, my credit rating not high enough, or maybe because I break water when I try to walk upon it or break wind when I make water. Whatever...
Whatever the reason, O Lord, thou hast forsaken me. And however righteously one may rail against the banks, the corporations, the government or whomever is responsible for my state of redundancy, at some point one is supposed to grab their bootstraps whether or not they exist and to PULL like Horatio Alger on crystal meth until one hath pulled themselves out of the muck and mire.
Even the most pitiable of us get tiresome which is why God really gave Job a break. In the movie The Beach, the man screaming in agony from a shark bite in the leg was eventually excommunicated by the others with a single caretaker because, O Lord, he was harshing their buzz with his screams of agony. At a wake for a cancer victim there are at least several who are relieved not so much at the end of the suffering of the departed but an end to their suffering.
But April Fool's Day will come soon with the attendant bills and that is not a joke and no laughing matter so I beseech thee for a break whether it come in the form of manna from heaven delivered by a really hot chick on a clamshell a la Botticelli or in Paypal donations or a job or, best of all, a book contract.
Hear me, O Lord, for I am at the end of my rope and it is looking more and more like a noose.
Sunday, March 27, 2011
April is the Cruelest Month
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JP, believe me: many people do care about you. But there are limits to what they can do.
ReplyDeleteGod, unfortunately, is not in the disaster prevention business. If He were, would He have inflicted a third nuclear disaster on the only nation on earth to have forsworn both nuclear weapons and aggressive warfare? Meanwhile, the nation that inflicted that technology on them has suffered no harm. For those of us who have walked through the preserved shattered ruins of Hiroshima, and heard the keening of small children as they saw photographs of burns and keloids and destruction, the injustice of it is hard to bear.
No, God is in the disaster mitigation business, of letting people know that no matter how bad things are, they are loved.
You are not a failure if you are hungry or homeless. You are not a failure just because your family turns their back on you. Just by being you, by enduring, you are a success.
Maybe you won't be able to keep up the fight for economic justice in this country. But others will. And they will be fighting for you, and for the fragment of themselves that is in you. You just have to be a good steward to the rest of you until that battle is won. Just let yourself trust that there is good even in these dark days.
And in that spirit, seek spiritual counseling. Tell a priest or a pastor (or a rabbi or an imam or a friend or even a bartender) that you feel abandoned. Very likely, they won't be able to help with the groceries. But they may be able to set you on the right road for taking hope into your heart, not as an expectation of some specific thing, but as a way of life.
May peace and joy be your loving companions.
Thanks, Charles, but since I'm an atheist and almost a teetotaler, I guess I'm shit out of luck as far as catharsis goes.
ReplyDeleteRemember, I never said that anyone owed me shit. It's all charity and charity, while some may feel it as a moral imperative, is always voluntary and never owed.
As for God, well... I think when he saw how we'd begun developing a few thousand years ago, he realized he fucked up or his committee did when we were created and scuttled away like the Ultimate Deadbeat Dad, hoping no one would notice our so-called divine parentage.
Hah!
"Humans? Who are these humans of whom you speak, stranger?"