Too Much Sadness: I
I’m sad today. I just happened on a blog run by FrontLine. The topic they will be exploring is the impact technology is having on our lives. The producer of the series found herself in one of those moments where you are propelled beyond the circumstance to a much more profound question. While cooking dinner for her family, she suddenly realized that her husband, sons, and daughter were all on separate computers each doing different tasks. She marveled at the availability of finding information quickly, or taking a picture with an iPhone, or emailing a grandmother but was troubled by being vastly separated while in close proximity. Isn’t life short enough? Shouldn’t we take advantage of our time together? And so the blog and Frontline series was born.
I proceeded to look at the most recent entry and found a comment about the military’s use of drones in Pakistan. Accompanying the text is a clip from Hearts and Minds, a popular 1974 documentary. The footage is disturbing and outrageous and makes me want to cry. I was reminded of another chilling piece from The Fog of War, where Robert McNamara describes the fire-bombing of Japanese cities during World War II, just before he indicts himself as a war criminal. His face about 5 seconds in and also at the end of the clip says it all. What makes me sad is that we haven’t learned much. The pilot interviewed in Hearts and Minds most pointedly says, when asked if we’ve learned anything, that, to the contrary, we seem to be avoiding learning. And it is not unlike the current debate about torture and “collateral damage”! It reminds me of a poem by an outraged poet. Naomi Shihab Nye captures succinctly my own sadness and outrage.
FOR MOHAMMED ZEID, Age 15
There is no stray bullet, sirs.
No bullet like a worried cat
crouching under a bush,
no half – hairless puppy bullet
dodging midnight streets.
The bullet could not be a pecan
plunking the tin roof,
not hardly, no fluff of pollen
on October’s breath,
no humble pebble in the street.
So don’t gentle it, please.
We live among stray thoughts,
tasks abandoned midstream.
Our fickle hearts are fat
with stray devotions, we feel at home
among bits and pieces,
all the wandering ways of words.
But this bullet had no innocence, did not
wish anyone well, you can’t tell us otherwise
by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend
of life, should not be granted immunity
by soft saying–friendly fire, straying death-eye,
why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?
Mohammed, Mohammed, deserves the truth.
This bullet had no secret happy hopes,
it was not singing to itself with eyes closed under the bridge
like the exiled lady in her precious faded hat.
—Naomi Shihab Nye
Poetry 180, page 168
