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What Are We Looking At?
by
Stephen Wunderli
There’s a painting
by Breughel entitled The Fall of Icarus that documents that
mythical event from an interesting perspective. Foreground is a
man at a plow. Peasants dot the pastoral scenes performing menial
tasks. In the sea is a passing ship, and off on the horizon we see
Icarus dropping into the ocean almost entirely unnoticed by the
rest of the world. That we don’t see this tragedy because of our
own self-focused machinations is only a portion of the story. The
other half is the good that we also don’t seem to notice.
In 1970, a group
of triage nurses treated a young soldier from the hell that was
the Vietnam War. He was so badly wounded that the exhausted doctor
moved on to help patients that had a better chance of making it.
The nurses refused to let him die, so they did everything they could.
The boy was only lucid for a short time, and in that time, he talked
of his family and about growing up in the Midwest. But it didn’t
last long, and despite their best efforts, he did die. The nurses
felt such a connection to the young man that they vowed to see his
parents when their tour was over.
A year later
they landed in San Francisco together and planned their pilgrimage
to the Midwest. But walking the city streets before boarding a train,
they were stunned at the reception they got. They were spit upon.
These brave women who had given up so much to save lives were treated
as if they were murderers. The scars remain today. Their story never
appeared in the newspapers, not their service, not their reception.
The boy’s identity is not a household name.
We are at war
again. Not a conventional war, as has been defined by the history
of warfare. Technically we are liberators on a peace mission. And
while politicians and pundits are at the plow in the foreground
turning over the same earth, and merchant ships sail on trade winds
to the next deal…Somewhere far away, Icarus falls from the sky;
a nurse desperately binds the wounds.
I stopped watching
the news for a while, and started watching the neighborhood instead.
There’s a boy on my son’s football team whose father left when he
was very young. His mother is addicted to prescription drugs. Everyday
his older brother gives him a ride to practice. I found out that
it isn’t his real brother, but a young man assigned to him through
Big Brothers and Big Sisters. He’s been doing it for six years,
three or four days a week, helping with homework, practice, questions
about growing up.
My neighbor,
Mary, collects bags of day-old baked goods from local bakeries and
delivers them to the soup kitchen three nights a week. North of
me is a WWII Air Force vet. He can’t get around much anymore, but
his wife can. Helen delivers fresh vegetables from her garden to
the widows. I heard someone blasting their horn impatiently at the
road construction in front of her house. Helen didn’t notice, after
all, the zucchinis were ripe. Mack lives up the street. He’s the
fire chief. He took his search and rescue dogs to ground zero to
search for bodies. He tears up when he talks about it. The school
kids stop by the station to feed his dog on their way home, and
maybe help wipe down the fire engine. Around the corner is the friend
who carried my 12-year-old son home after he broke his elbow in
a rollerblade crash; the couple who adopted a four-year-old from
the projects of Chicago, the family who went to China, twice, to
adopt two girls.
I think the
great events in history went largely unnoticed at the time they
occurred. Time was needed to roll them over like beach stones, to
see which ones were gems worth holding on to. Many events were vane,
human attempts at deifying themselves---the Caesar system in Rome,
the family feud among monarchs that became world war one, professional
sports. Geopolitical history turned on these events, or the reactions
to them. But personal histories seem to thrive in spite of the world’s
focus on major events. I met a man in a village in Kenya who brought
his sick wife to a crude medical clinic. It was a three mile trek.
She couldn’t walk, so he brought her in a wheelbarrow and tearfully
pleaded for her life. I met a boy in Brazil whose father dropped
him off at a train station and never came back. He lived at a boarding
school for orphans and was learning a trade. What do you suppose
affected my life more---that Iraq was hiding something, or that
a Kurd on my son’s soccer team could describe the devastation of
chemical warfare unleashed on his village?
It makes me
wonder about what we look at, day after day---our competitive lives,
our 24-hour-a-day news channels; the playing time our son gets in
little league, the grammatical mistakes in a Sunday school teacher’s
lesson. What becomes so large in our lives that it makes everything
else insignificant? What are we missing in the meantime?—The Fall
of Icarus? The rising Son?
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© 2003 Meridian
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