With apologies to my LJ friends, since I put this there, too. I’ve needed so badly to get this out of my head.
There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot. It’s from an interview with a holocaust survivour, and I’ll be damned if I can think of or find where I read it at. Regardless, the interviewer had asked this man why so many Jews stayed in Germany when they could see for themselves what was happening. The man replied, “So many Jews have pianos. It’s hard to leave a piano behind.”
I can’t get that out of my mind.
To see what’s happening, to see your friends and your family disappear bit by bit, to see the governmental system break down and replace itself with something utterly unknown and scary and just plain wrong. To see so many people support the new system, whether through fear or through actual belief. To know it’s based upon hating you…to not be able to convince anyone of the inherent wrongness of what is happening. Helplessness.
I also think about the quintessential “war-torn nations.” I feel I have to put it in quotes, for we’ve heard the phrase so often it’s almost meaningless at this point. People that live every day not knowing if this is the day they die. We all know we can go at any point, but we don’t live with that knowledge, cheek-to-jowl. We don’t sleep with it and breathe it, eat it and dream of it. Many people in the world do. Bombs every day, going to a loved one’s house and finding the building simply gone, the utter helplessness of not being able to protect your child or your wife or your mother or your…jesus. It’s too momentous to even fully grasp. Yet they stay. More than a few can’t leave for monetary reasons, I’m sure. And more than that just simply aren’t allowed to leave. But how many stay just hunkered down, thinking it has to get better soon. Their whole lives are there, and it’s best to stay and wait and see than to leave so much behind.
Pianos.
Strange days, my friends. I think about us, as Americans. I wonder if we’re in the beginning of this. The tragedy that has befallen us and the turns our lives have taken scare me to the core of my being.
The thing that scares me most is how relieved we all are at the recent plane crash. I’m not throwing stones here, far be it from. But to be able to just write it off as “only an accident” is terrifying when you think about it. How can we walk the line between putting our strong face on and going about, just business as usual? Can we all think back for just a moment to 9/11, please? It’s so hard to do so. The absolute pit of our stomach fear. The certainty that we were going to war. The knowledge that our lives were forever changed. The Orwellian sense of unreality, not knowing for the first time in most of our lives what the world would generally be like tomorrow.
I remember Desert Storm like it was yesterday. I was in college and one of my brothers was in one of the first deployed units. I was terrified and hurt and worried, but this is different. This was right here on home turf. Those fuckers INVADED us. They killed us. They took part of our heart, but made the rest of it beat more strongly.
However.
I think a lot about leaving the States. I do, I do, I do. I think about getting that one-way flight to Australia and keeping my head down. Waiting to see what happens. I think about it every single day, yet I don’t. I wonder if we, as a nation, are on the verge of being that “war-torn nation.” If we’re looking down the barrel at being ravaged and twisted and becoming a mere shell of what we were. We’re a great nation, to be sure, but it could happen. Not quickly, no. It so seldom happens quickly. But, oh, my friends and neighbours, it could happen indeed. What if we all look back in a year or five or ten or 20 and think, “I could have gotten out while there was time. I saw the signs and I didn’t pay any attention?” What if we lose our very lives because we have blind faith?
We all have our pianos here. All of us. I can see us in our living rooms, polishing and tuning our pianos, looking at the beautiful gleam and listening to the round tones as our houses burn down around us.
I think about this. All the time.
