What Do We Do?: Two Images, One Day: Everyday Magic, Day 1,120

In the face of so much happening so fast, it's hard to know what to do, especially when cruelty is at the wheel. So it's no wonder that I have started this post several times, then realized I didn't know what to say. But just like we shouldn't stop acting because we don't know what will make a difference, we shouldn't stop speaking, writing, making art, or dancing in the living room either. Life wants to show itself and unfold through us even if we have no idea why or how.

To get more specific: yesterday. I spied Facebook and saw the photo again I've been trying to avoid: the men in the El Salvador prison tied together in lines and rows, in what -- from a distance -- looks like rows of snails to me. Then I realized what it was, and I'm paralyzed by the terror of it. These men from the U.S. -- whether they were here illegally or legally, whether gang members or not, whether guilty of crimes or not -- being dehumanized to this extent without any due process......this is what I don't have words for.

Although that's not completely true because I have one big word that comes to mind: the Holocaust. Having studied the Holocaust and written a book about it, plus merely being Jewish and growing up in a way where it was a topic of great inquiry in my upbringing, I have a sense of how this kind of cruelty happens.

But that is not what I want to write about now, and besides, there are many others who have written and can write about how such evil evolved with greater depth and accuracy. What I want to speak to at this moment is what we do with glimpsing, hearing about, witnessing, sensing acts of great injustice played out as the worst humans can be. I don't know.

Back to yesterday: I also read an amazing long essay in the New York Times, "This is the Holocaust Story I Said I Didn't Want to Write," by Taffi Brodesser-Akner. There's a image Brodesser-Akner shares from a story Eugene Ginter, a Holocaust survivor, conveyed to her: how, when he was boy, he went through what he called "a tour of the different hotels," meaning ghettos and concentration camps. After the war, he was taken to a Czechoslovakian orphanage where surviving parents came, looking for their surviving children, and against the odds, his mother found him.

Last night, in between dreams that involved driving places with my dead in-laws, I woke and thought about the picture of men in the El Salvador prison. I felt so sacred, angry, heartbroken, and powerless. Then I told myself to instead focus on the moment Ginter described: going downstairs in the orphanage to meet a woman who could be his mother. He was skeptical about it actually being his mother because he had inadvertently disappointed other mothers who thought he might be their son. But this was his mother, and I rejoiced in the moment I imagined of them rushing into each other's arms.

Today I go through my relatively happy day thinking of both images and how relatively safe I am at this moment, delighting in the scent of blossoming viburnum and lilac. I eat delicious homemade chicken vegetable soup I made while reading a book. I pick tulips to put in a vase. I work with a coaching client, visit my doctor to talk about my high cholesterol, pick up more vegetables and vitamins at the Merc (our natural food co-op). Now I sit on my front porch -- the first day in a long time it's warm enough -- feel the breeze re-arranging my hair, read a little Pema Chodron, then write to you.

I don't have a way to add all this up into a clear sense of what to do -- of what you or I or we should do. I tell myself it's important to look at disturbing images even if they horrify me because the brutalities of history need witnessing if things are to shift for the better. I tell myself not to glance at the news beyond my early-morning headline scanning I do, still in bed with no intention to read any of what the headlines lead to. I tell myself that such times are full of incongruencies, the severely bitter (the men in prison), the unbelievably sweet (the boy reuniting with his mother), the lovely weather, the overwhelming loss and meanness and chaos.

I also tell myself, and obviously you too, that change keeps changing, and in the meantime, I will do the things that seem to help, even in ways I can't guarantee. I will call the legislators regularly, often leaving recorded messages because no one is answering. I will show up at our regular protests in Lawrence, Kansas because that is where I find my tribe as well as some solace and inspiration. And speaking of tribes, I will clean my house and cook up a giant vegetarian shepherd's pie for our annual seder here, another chance to explore -- if not exactly celebrate this year -- the nature of liberation, the years wandering in the desert, the plagues and lost ones, the promise of a better place we may and will, I hope, arrive.

Until then, I will wish, even if it seems impossible, for the day men are untied from each other so that they can rush into the arms of their wives, parents, and children, whether they're back home in this country or some place hospitable to them.