actreevism, interrupted

okay, so it didn't happen. TK had this thing. and j and i had both just come home from respective out-of-town trips. so we didn't decorate the park with peace signs in time for the city's huge fourth of july festival.

next time.

(our fab friend V comes for a visit in a mere FOUR days, so surely something appropriately subversive will happen with her company.)

but, j and i DID go over to TK's last night for the fireworks. she lives across the street from the park where the fireworks were happening, so we waited until 10 minutes to showtime, then downed shots of tequila and snuck across to the park, in the dark, where we found some tree stumps just on the other side of a line of trees from the crowds of people.

so it was just us, and the grass, and the tree stumps, and the few bats circling in the air, and the almost-full moon, watching the explosives in the sky, erupting into showers of light.

every time they set off a firework, the sound of it ricocheted off the roofs nearby and the pavement, and it sounded like the sound of bombs. it sounded a little too much like the sound of bombs, and like gunfire. i wondered if anyone was wondering the same thing, that here we were, celebrating our country's independence by shooting colorful explosives into the air that sounded like bombs, while on the other side of the world, our military was busy bombing another country.

the fireworks were pretty.

they've gotten fancy since i was a kid, with giant smiley faces and hearts exploding in the sky.

but it felt fake and hollow, celebrating our independence by setting off things that sound like bombs. i've never been bothered by this before, and i've seen fireworks almost every year since before i can recall.

earlier, before the fireworks started, j and TK and i were sitting in TK's front yard, watching as the families poured down the sidewalks toward the park. we were talking about a dinner party TK had attended the night before. one of her hosts was a liberal history professor at the local college. and he talked at dinner about the need for the US to hunt down the terrorists and kill them. that the US wasn't a bad place to live, so we needed to put the terrorists in there place and go back to being safe again.

TK couldn't believe this was a liberal history professor she was talking to. she tried the line about how the US has engendered ill will, that to fight "terrorism" perhaps we should reconsider some of our foreign policies, that we can't expect to convince people to stop blowing themselves up by blowing up their countries. the man didn't budge. and neither did TK. and the whole thing left her feeling a little unsettled.

so she recounted all of this last night, in her yard, before the fireworks started that sounded like bombs.

j and i nodded in sympathy. yes, it's impossible to change each other's minds, we agreed. yes, we said, it is more complicated that just killing "those" people and bombing "them" back to where they came from. yes, we nodded, the US's declining reputation around the world has happened for good reason.

"so," TK asked us, "why do you think this way?"

we didn't have great answers -- why do we think anything we think? where did we learn to feel what we feel? these questions require some degree of reflection. but right then, the fireworks started, so we ditched our conversation and ran across the street and found the tree stumps and watched the fireworks that shook the ground.

fireworks always last a little too long for me, and my mind wanders. last night, it wandered back to TK's question. and i think the answer is empathy. as a child, i was taught, always, to move through the world with empathy. to value other human beings feelings and perspectives at least as much as my own. to be willing to sacrifice for someone else's benefit. to see the interconnectedness of all human life -- that if one of us suffers, so do we all.

and i think, if you aren't taught this from an early age, you grow up to become an adult who says the answer to terrorism is to bomb them all back to the stone age. or someone who makes $50,000 a year and still shops at wal-mart even after attending a lecture on sweatshops. or someone who can walk by a homeless person on the sidewalk and make a snide comment about urban blight.

i suppose if you aren't taught empathy as a child, you become someone content with being selfish, someone whose sense of what is right revolves around what is right for you, someone whose heart and mind are hardened by complacency, someone who cannot imagine why "they" hate us, who can watch fox news and nod along at the fountain of self-righteousness.

this morning, after we got our new coffee pot to work and were gulping the first cups, j turned to me and said, "you know, i had this funny thought last night. and i wondered if anyone else thought it. i thought how crazy it was that we were setting off fireworks that sounded like bombs. in other countries, they hear that sound all the time, but it isn't entertainment."

"no," i said to him, "i don't think that's crazy at all."