It’s my daughter L’s birthday today. There was much talk on the bus about presents this morning, what was received, what is still wanted. L’s older sister R is the last of my three to have her birthday and she said to me:
“Mummy, there are two things that I want for my birthday that I don’t think I’ll get. They are an end to the war in Syria, and Donald Trump not being elected anymore.”
Sweet but meaningless. I agreed that she was unlikely to get either. I explained a little about the US electoral system, didn’t even attempt to explain Syria because I can’t, I just don’t know enough to answer the questions that will surely come if I talk about the little I do know. But (as bloody always) it made me think. Are we completely powerless? We all wish for world peace like beauty queens, but what do we DO? Is there anything that I can give to R to do. It’s good to want what she wants, but wanting without action is meaningless. She’s only ten though. Where do her responsibilities lie?
I try to teach the children to be kind. I think that is something crucial that IS always in their power to choose to be. Nothing R can do can change the multiple cruelties done each moment to men, women, children, brothers, sisters, grandparents, in Syria, things I can imagine but I don’t want her to quite yet. But she can be kind to her siblings, to her friends and school mates, to strangers in the street, even to me. That matters. That makes the small geography she inhabits a little better. Does it have any effect on Syria, or those whom Syria touches? Possibly not.
I was reminded, when thinking about what R had said about my friend LC in Los Angeles. A smart, committed left-wing Jewish woman, someone who actually did things, went to prisons to protest executions, she said to me, with a certain amount of pride in her voice, that her teenage niece was no longer able to believe in God after 9/11.
“Really?”
I said.
“So she didn’t have any trouble with the Holocaust then?”
I could see LC was offended, so I didn’t push it. Maybe I should have because it was absolutely what I thought. I used the Holocaust because we were both Jewish but it could (maybe it should ) have been anything else, the death of Russians under Stalin, the decimation of the Native American population, the number of children lost, just that year, to gun crime in the USA, the number of people lost in the grim misery of the drug trade in pretty much any South American country, earthquakes in Iran or Japan, famine in Africa, children killed in car crashes, children dying of leukemia (or of anything), parents dying of lukemia, lonely people dying all by themselves of lukemia and never even being missed. Why do things only matter when they feel like they affect us?
I don’t think I feel the same pride I heard in LC’s voice when I write about R’s birthday wish. What I want to do is understand where responsibility lies and the how to deal with it, seeing as I feel so much of it myself. To understand if there is anything I can actually do, and then try (as LC actually did) to do it. Which is what this, here now on the screen, is all about. I can continue trying to be kind, but I can also write. I can try and write out my confusion and my ideas, and hopefully it can take me somewhere that translates out of birthday wishes and into action. It feels very small now. I know how to write, and I think this blog is live, but I haven’t quite figured out how to find it on-line, an address for it to give out, even quite how to put a title in. But I can learn those things in time, and even small and better than nothing at all.