American Phoenix

Ashes to Ashes

“There was a silly damn bird called a phoenix back before Christ, every few hundred years he built a pyre and burnt himself up. He must have been the first cousin to Man...”

Ray Bradbury (Fahrenheit 451)

I had a dream last night about ashes—the ashes of children put into small galvanized cans on plaques that could be hung on a wall or a tree. I woke up wondering about this dream—it didn't seem particularly sad, just matter of fact. Like this is what you do when a child dies. Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451 that we have one advantage over the phoenix. We know what a “damn silly thing we just did.” He surmises that when enough of us know and remember perhaps we'll stop doing it. Perhaps we'll realize that children don't have to die young, and their deaths should not become ho-hum.

My son, Jake, who works in drug and alcohol recovery, posted this about the Sante Fe School shootings that happened in Texas on May 18^th. “This makes 16 school shootings already this year, and all we can talk about is whether we need more or less guns in school and in our communities. There is so much more to this issue than gun control but we get distracted by the flashing neon signs placed in front of us by politicians, big business, and the media. Lost behind that smokescreen, we more or less ignore (or at best downplay) other symptoms of this epidemic, like the need for more available and effective mental health services—services that might be able to intercede with the bullied and the bullies, the potential shooters and the potential victims, the lonely, the depressed, the confused, the people just trying to grow up and find their way in this increasingly crazy world.” This is one of the damn silly things we have done. As a result we have ten more dead children.

There are no adequate words for this, and all of us are out of breath from screaming at one another. If more eyes (and hearts) open among people in power, who have the ability to act to change these conditions, then perhaps someday we'll stop making the funeral pyre and burning ourselves up. Rising from the ashes is a romantic notion, but it would be far better for our precious young people to not have been thrown into the fire in the first place. Our refusal to deal in a merciful way with this problem with go down in the annals of history along side slavery, and lynching, and the trail of tears as a tragic failure on the part of the American people.

                                                          In the Spirit,

                                                              Jane