Travel Log #24

December 20, 2009

These days I feel like we drink up war like water; we pass it through--in and out. I tell my own story for once and a nineteen-year-old soldier looks at me and says, "I'm sorry. This story isn't jarring to me." That's the point. It isn't and that's the reason my friends here are Israeli. I don't hve anythingon them. They get the point without it being made.

I'm still upset. "I love my country," I tell her and she says, "Which one?"

"The United States," I reply. But then: "I love both, but the United States is..." I can't finish the sentence. "I can write this better than I can say it," I say. The United States is where my roots are, firmly planted. It's where my dreams are, it's where there's at least a dichotomy, at least an illusion of being free, and absolutely all the potential of so many American Dreams. "It's an easy life. No worries," she says. I raise my eyebrows. No, not so easy, I think. I list some reasons why.

"And you think we don't have that here? We do. We have it on top of everything else. War, politics, settlements, illegal settlements, drought."

I can't compete with her but I know it isn't a competition and I also know that if it were, we'd be tied. Why? Because life might be easier in America, easy as a life in a doll's house, easy as a life where people get by on credit and designer love. Knock on the door and it's empty. Raise a crucial question and the answer is apathy. Look for yourself in the mirror and the reflection is fragile as wet papier-mâché, melting and soggy, with a form undetermined. On the surface it's all smiles, sweet tea,and air conditioning. Physical comfort. We are the experts at the material world, so spoiled we don't even know what we have. So spoiled we don't even know what we're missing.

Turn around and step foot in a different land; there are no smiles, there's no water, and we have to deal with the smothering heat. Annihilation is a real threat. More responsibility and blame are borne on this country's shoulders than any other. But when the questions are asked, the answer isn't apathy, it's as many arguments as there are people in the room, or more. There is no doll's house; there's a bomb shelter and its smell still lingers fresh on the people's scents. Knock on the door and history answers you. Look for yourself in the mirror and try to find the person you lost the first time you put on that uniform, the first time you fired a gun, the first time you fired blindly because if it's a decision between me and everyone else, the trigger finger goes all giddy and chooses everyone else. Not me. Look for yourself in the mirror and and try to find the person you lost when your best friend didn't come back instead of you, when you had a vision plastered so permanently onto your brain, it's all you can see and you remembered so much you forgot.

In America, we no longer have the draft, but we still have an army, and coming from Georgia, sometimes it feels like we do. Boys come back different if they come back at all. They look in the mirror and "home" doesn't exist anymore. Then the press wonders why the percentage of suicides rises. High schoolers get inundated with cherry blossom propaganda: "Support our troops. They give us our freedom". The problem is, those high schoolers grow up and they still haven't looked one inch beyond their noses; they have no inkling of what their freedom really means, no idea of what it really is. "Freedom" has become an empty word, slandered by rhetoric. We have squandered it for pictures of places far away and never take the time to understand them.

It upset me because we've become so free we have no idea what it is from which we are free. Our liberty has made us arrogant, careless, gluttonous. It upset me because I love my freedom and I understand the price; I want to share the meaning of it with those, who like myself, were born in America. I don't fit, so I look elsewhere, but I don't fit there, either. I want to reverse the image of "American"="Stupid" and "loud" and "rich" and "apathetic". I want to represent the American Dream. And then I look at those around me and most of the time, I cannot answer for them. They are the reality and I am the elusive figment of my own imagination--and I go up in smoke. The smoke is ephemeral and then it's completely gone. I can't represent because that representation would be a lie--I am outside of the mainstream. On the other hand, though, it wouldn't be a lie at all, because I am, unquestioningly, a product of America, "Made in Brooklyn".

I am an American chameleon: I can fit the mould of anywhere, but I know who I am underneath. I am patient; I can wait forever to find what I'm looking for as long as I never stop searching.

In the meantime, there are orange trees that line the streets of Rehovot and I've picked my share from the grove at the Weisman Institute. The juice is delicious and runs down my hands. I endure the itching. Leaves come off in my hand with the fruit. If I don't get anything else out of this, I'll have gotten Jaffa oranges, and taste is one sense I can never wholly share with anyone else.

"Let it pass," the soldier says. Let all the burdens pass.
"But others come to replace them," I counter. "So what's the difference?"
"Let those pass, too. Then, your heart will be light. At least for a little while."
"I can't. I can't stop caring."
"Don't stop caring, just let it pass."

It's different from apathy. It's a talent acquired from living without unheeded freedom.
I can't let it pass. Caring is holding on for me. I understand the difference but I like it my way.

"There's a prize at the end of the tunnel, Little Girl," says Uriel.
"Good. I'll keep my eye on it."
"Share the delight of the orange with me," begs the angel.
"Some things, my dear, you have to let pass. Not like water, in and out, but like burdens. One nature cannot become another. Right?"
The angel smiles and for a moment, I feel weightless. The angel carries my history for a little while and then the play goes on.