Oh, our world (and our selves too)

It's Sunday morning: Silas is napping (home with a runny nose), Ben is at church and I am reading the newspaper. The whole world, it seems, is up in arms. Violence continues to rage and destroy people in Baghdad and all over Iraq. Marches against governments buzz in Taiwan, Ukraine, and coups are in the wings in Sudan. The Darfur crisis continues. Starvation is rampant all over Africa. AIDS. Child trafficking. Sex slaves and the market, violence, pornography that accompanies it. Gobs of explosives found in Spain. A new deep water port paid for by China in Pakistan. Oil. Oil. Oil. And global warming. I realized this morning (again), that somehow, Ben, Silas and I produce as much trash as a small nation. This is not ok.
(check this out for more thoughts - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xHWTLA8WecI )

How eerie it feels, after pausing to consider, to sit in a structurally sound home that I have filled with objects and colors of my choosing, windows intact, locks on every opening, the quiet of sleep at night in the absence of terror, watching maples push tiny leaf-paws into Spring air.

We feel so safe here a lot of the time -- even in the midst of all of our American dysfunction, obesity, overcrowded prisons, partisan hatred, crises in education, poverty and injustice especially for our poor. But overall, I think we -- we being the educated, the wealthy -- wrap up in our silky lives and carry on wearing hefty earplugs and singing to ourselves with averted eyes. How else could we carry on? A lot of us feel untouchable, I think. I do. Like all the violence and poverty surging and spewing all over the world is so other. Tragic. But other.

I half want to pull out my woolly earplugs and put my nose on the ground and realize all this Stuff people are and are suffering from is a reflection of me, instead of a picture hanging across the room. And I half want to sprint to the hills and set up a tent (with lots of big pillows and mattresses in it) among wildflowers with my closest friends and family and live there happily ever after roasting marshmallows.

*sigh*

I've been watching BBC/Discovery's "Planet Earth" -- which, I might add, is stunning, sobering, and refreshing -- and have been trying to learn from the animals. I haven't come up with much except that one, their lives is 100% about survival, there is little room for gratuitous anything, and two, they rely a lot on each other. Maybe that's a lot.