Holding Back Tears On My Sunny Days

Why does sadness overwhelm me when life is so good? I remember too much about the casualties that I have left behind. Gratitude has to be a part of it, that against all odds I have been spared when so many of the worthy are no longer here. Survivors’ guilt has to be a part of it. Do you sometimes attempt to make your own accounting?

How many are the children that I never got to see, that never got to see the sunny days that I enjoy so much. The children of my Bride that I never got to see, my grandson who gave up on the hope for a better life, these are a part of the past I dare to re-live. The nameless of the Holocaust, whose names were known to countless others of my co-religionists, (we seek to record them for posterity,) haunt my dreams. I know I am greedy beyond reason.

My days are almost too beautiful to bear in their richness. I sing songs to myself, celebrating my small triumphs and the absence of pain. I hear the sounds of laughter in my memories. The music I love plays in my ears. So many of the people I love are still there in my life. When I contrast my present with what fate has dealt to so many others, I am shattered with injustices I confront. I have no answers to offer, no justifications to advance. Why me and you and not him and her?

I feel like a whirling Dervish, dancing on the head of a pin. See a science arriving too late to save so many lives and contrast the speed with which we arrived with solutions for COVID. Science to the rescue and yet see pseudo-science used as a rationale for condemning a whole race to death. Greek culture, exploring the essential nature of man, the scientific method, and the democratic ideal, many centuries ago, and see the eons of Dark Ages and disease. Monotheism, exhorting us to seek out our better angels, apprehensive of an all-seeing eye, and then contemplate organized religion promoting rationales for untold crimes against humanity.  

Regard the Marxist myth for which tens of millions died in Soviet Russia and China. Contrast the elitist Roosevelt who fashioned modifications to Capitalism that rescued the lives of a hundred million Americans. I remember that the Marxist principle of from each according to his gifts and to each according to his needs, was also used to fashion pioneer communities. The sacrifices of believers restored a desecrated landscape, and ultimately succeeding in building a renewed Jewish state. Unbelievably, it took so few determined people to make the difference.

Yin and yang and a multitude of tears is the story of human civilization. I shudder my way from the personal to the general, and back again. The impedimenta of our passage are gathered in our galleries, our museums, and the pot-pouris of our living spaces, real and virtual. They are there in our graveyards, marked and unmarked, some hidden away in our memories, to be visited when we dare.

We constantly redefine what is art and artifact. We, all of us, sometimes overwhelmed by it all, pick and choose what it is that has meaning for us. Sometime we look to others to instruct us on what, by its very nature, should be a matter of individual choice. I choose the things that are treasures in my own eyes. They bear the weight of my personal emotional commitment and I glory in them, bringing me to tears. You all have your own idols before which you prostrate yourself.

How many are those in my life that did not get the full measure of my attention they deserved. I hang my head in the chagrin I feel. It is much too late to make amends to so many. It must be the same for so many of you out there. I rode off into the sunrise pursuing my dreams with hardly a backward glance at those who sustained me during my beginning days. Too much taken for granted. My regret finds little comfort in the recollection. I am conducting my personal ‘mea culpa’.

Does all this deserve some recompense? Will my tale change someone’s course of action? Do we who are still here owe someone, something, some cause, a recompense? I exert so much of my efforts just to keep body and soul together. Should I, should we, be doing something more to justify our places in the universe? Can I listen more, speak less, empathize more, extend again a helping hand? Can I yet alter the course of humanity’s journey in the universe in a positive way? Is each one of us that significant an actor?

 I am dancing madly on the head of a pin.

 

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