Revenge @ MindSay

I felt dread.

For the next two months and off and on for several weeks more, to colleagues, friends, and family I emailed all the poems and short excerpts of prose I could think of that might offer comfort and context for understanding.

“I think we should drop nuclear bombs on Mecca,” proposed a man in one of my classes not long after the religion of the suspected perpetrators was first reported, “and incinerate every single one of them towel heads and turn their whole fucking country into one big concrete parking lot.”

My student insisted he wasn’t joking.

"Yes, you are."

"No, I'm not."

"You are."

"I'm not!"

The carpet bombing of Afghanistan began.

As I stood at the sink and washed dishes at Christmas I asked one of our holiday dinner guests if he knew how many innocent Afghans had been killed in the war there. The media had studiously avoided reporting any estimate. I was curious. My question annoyed my guest.

He made a face.

“I don’t give a damn how many innocent Afghans have been killed!” he exclaimed.

The victims of the terrorist attacks on September 11 and the victims of our retaliation in Afghanistan were all total strangers to him. He knew none of them. Yet the thought of innocent American victims brought him to the verge of tears. His eyes glistened as we spoke. Their lives were precious. The death of innocent Afghans meant nothing to him. Their lives were worthless. He had only his labels to help him think and feel.

American?

Precious.

Afghan?

Worthless.

In my classes I tried everything I could think of to defuse the anger of my students. One of my email correspondents was a demographer, I told them, who claimed to bear allegiance to no national state nor to any organized religion.

“She calls herself an earthling and a freethinker,” I explained.

Fearing possible recrimination from patriots and true believers of a wide range of nations and churches she asked that I withhold her name and email address if I were to share her remarks with others. Despite recent events she remained optimistic. Even if every American should die in a terroristic attack—from anthrax, say, or from radiation—on the great graph of historical time the death of 300,000,000 people was a significant but still relatively minor blip; and 94 percent of the human race, about 6.2 billion people, would remain alive.

For purposes of comparison my friend the demographer asked that we consider the effect of the bubonic plague on 14th-century Europe. Within ten years the disease had killed 25,000,000 people, fully one third of the European population, yet just a short while later—in historical time—there had occurred the justly celebrated Renaissance.

Though her numbers were right, my demographer was a fiction of my own invention who allowed me to present both information and an attitude and perspective I wanted my students to consider without blaming me.

The moderator.

That when you plan to get even with someone, you are only letting that person continue to hurt you.

 

 

Okay so that person has hurt you or robbed you of what you think is rightfully yours. If I told you that that does not count, it does not count for a reason to strike back at the other person – that wanting to get even may hurt him yes and which will make you in turn very happy bout it too yes again. But truth of the matter is – you’re the one who’ll be hurting most by it. Why? --Because you are making yourself quite open or vulnerable for a counter-strike again and again. You are giving him permission to hurt you repeatedly because apparently he won’t just sit there taking your punches too but will punch you right back in – cause he is the type who would. And you know what, in always thinking about your rage it would only serve to enrage you some more. That’s even hurting you more than you ever know. Your own rage will destroy you. So you see the other guy is winning over you without even trying hard enough.

 

But think about this --- can he be so sure that what he has stolen from you is the thing for him that it would work well for him too? You see, wanting something just because it looks good on the other person does not guarantee that the same thing would look good or will work well for you too. Nope, that’s not how it works. One man’s medicine may be poison for another.

 

So what to do? Well, leave! Your leaving will douse cold water over his fiery temper and greed. How can he be continually angry too when there’s nobody around to be angry with or at? There’s nobody or nothing that would add coal to the fire in the furnace…his furnace.

 

And what have you lost? If you think about it, not much really because you can always get it back in your life just the way you are. That’s how you succeeded in the first place.

I mean  how stupid can you get? It was well after sunrise and those two animals I adopted were still dead asleep under all those fluffers. first I tried the cover near the yellow tree and all calico did was get up open it a little and climb back with greybeard. so I switched to greybeard's side. They had put a tray with water under that window but today the tray was dry- it made a good drink last night- and so I started chewing on that window cover. it makes a great crunchy sound, better than the white paper  calico sometimes gives me to tear.

 

calico tried her "No, Abi" thing again. I ignored her. does she actually think my name is Abi? My friends call me abigailsmithadams but that might be too hard for her to remember or pronounce. Well she sat up and I knew we were making progress. I went back to crunching and sure enough she stumbled over to the white box I sit on and brought out the dry bird bits, sprinkled some on the bed near her hips and dove under the covers again.

 

I was happy. I love to prevail but I fear it's another day in the fire box room. Maybe she will move that weird smelling tree in here for me to climb. maybe if i go sit on her lap and purr........... her fur is fuzzy pink today. and her hind legs are covered in dots. animals. I wish someone would write a book so I could know what she is thinking.

i realized sometime this morning that the old header that i had for this blog is gone. i'd already thought about all the other parts of this layout being gone, too, but i thought about putting the old one back on here n then i remember that it, just like all the other pieces of various blog layout that i've ever made, were on the USB drive that i lost back in April. i suppose i could make another one, but i've gotta admit, i don't really feel like it. Reanna is coming back monday or tuesday n i just wanna unpack the last couple boxes i have, sweep the kitchen a little bit so that it looks kinda clean when she gets back, n play the sims. i don't know if i mentioned it on here, but one of the sims that came w/ the university expansion pack was named jimmy phoenix. (yeah, the only thing that could have made it worse was if his middle name was daniel) well a while back i killed him, brought him back to life, then killed him again, n then i resurrected him as a zombie. i think i'll kill him again. :D

i wonder if i'm over this now. i've said that a lot, but i'm of course questioning it again. i mean, fuck, about an hour ago i was tryin to help him out w/ what to say to that girl. n it really doesn't bother me either, i don't feel so jealous, but i wonder if its because he got my imagination goin. That's how he keeps putting it with her sending him a text wishing him happy b-day n all. its so odd cuz so many of those things he was saying about her are things i've felt about n towards him. i feel sorry for him, but at the same time i can feel that little voice in side laughing n thinking, "now u know how it feels, bitch."

 

its cute tho, seeing him like this. i know the only reason he's talking to me this way is cuz his other friends aren't around, but fuck, i'm always happy to be there for n e one as a last resort because at least it means i'm on the list. i've always thought of it that way before i even knew him. i still wonder a lot of things tho n have a lot of questions i wish i could ask, but perhaps the time will come. so far many of the things i've wanted to tell him have come up in due time.

 

i guess i have to wait.