So, what dreadful punishment would the elders prescribe? Would I be merely spurned and reduced to silence, like Abraham? Or would they reserve a harsher ordeal, the kind that only the bruised egos of snubbed missionaries can conjure up?
For a brief instant, spurred by anger, I considered absconding to Gehenna, never to return. Gehenna: an underworld of burning garbage and souls on fire. Raw. Inclement. Dangerous. Down-to-earth in its uncompromising complexity, in the dreariness of its relentless reality. Cruel and pitiable. Loathsome and heartbreaking. Vile and tragic. Everything about Gehenna takes me back to the primeval horrors I had chronicled a lifetime earlier, and which my impassioned reports, the millions in foreign aid, the perseverance of private organizations and the dedication and generosity of armies of volunteers had failed to eradicate.
Words survive in the impersonal, two-dimensional realm of the printed page, but they fail to bring change. Instead, they leave a wasteland of lofty rhetoric, sublime yearnings and exalted covenants that do nothing to alter human nature, chill passions, curb hatred. Some horrors are simply too shocking for words or, as deconstructionist philosophy suggests, writing is a dangerous substitute for living as it is likely to sacrifice fact in favor of personal perception.
*
Ebbing passion and waning romanticism in the presence of horror produce a different kind of desolation, one felt deeply in an inaccessible region of one’s soul. For years I thought that one way of erring on the side of justice was to side unerringly with the victims of injustice -- the vanquished, the dispersed, the humiliated, the persecuted, and the forgotten. Behind prison walls. At mass graves and hurriedly dug sepulchers. Wherever voices of dissent and cries for freedom had been hushed. Amid the anonymous bones scattered about the steaming earth. Pogroms, torture, war, genocide, ethnic cleansing. They’d all become a blur in an unceasing tempest of human agony. In-your-face prime-time images of man’s inhumanity to man don’t lie. Our world, the evening news reminds us, is a sewer in which we wade, knee-deep, in the blood of martyrs. Gathered around the dinner table, we watch them die or fade away like ghosts. “Past is prelude,” we declare with snooty condescension. We owe it to our fragile, overtaxed psyches to forget an endless stream of atrocities -- Shoah, the massacre of native Americans, Biafra, the intertribal carnage between Hutus and Tutsis, the bloodbath in Chiapas and the Guatemalan highlands, Bosnia, the 60-year-old blood-letting between Israelis and Palestinians, Iraq, Afghanistan, the wanton murder of street children.
Distance, racial differences, cultural incongruities, all help intellectualize other people’s agony. We endure it by perfunctorily purging our souls after each act of infamy. “You can’t change human nature,” we pontificate, as we partake of dessert. In a pinch, a mind-numbing sitcom will help set our minds at ease. We survive the truth by looking the other way.
The heavy capital of idealism and exuberance I had invested in unmasking vampires had by now steadily dwindled. The reason for this weariness was not a lack of energy or a diminished commitment to justice, but the cumulative effect of disappointment and disgust at people crippled by indolence and lethargy. I had spent nearly two decades fighting their battles as if they were my own, my activism exhausted in a futile effort to agitate the popular conscience, to stiffen backbones weakened by despotism and exploitation. In so doing, I had finally hit a brick wall and the stars the impact produced in the back of my eyes showered me with an insight of blinding clarity. At long last, I understood that mine was a puny and hopeless contest against formidable foes. I realized that people don’t change, seldom rebel, not on the streets, not at the polls. A short memory and a weak character will do that to people. Neither alienation nor profound discontent will spur them to shake the political dustbin. Fearful of change, unnerved by serious reformation, they will choose to be seduced by the echo of old, hackneyed words rather than awakened and aroused by the unsettling resonance of truth.
Passive, submissive, the masses never look back, except to reminisce about a blurry and irretrievable past. They’re too busy existing and procreating like lemmings to realize that they’re being fleeced, that they’re being led to the slaughterhouse then devoured by the very shepherds entrusted with their care. Occasionally, they give in to knee-jerk reactions, a primordial reflex now reduced to feeble tics that are promptly stilled by police truncheons and extrajudicial executions. Feeling the sting of injustice and institutionalized villainy, they will succumb to a brief and atypical act of defiance that horrifies the flock then is promptly swept under the rug of public indifference. Anticipated and tolerated by the oligarchy, these random displays of exasperation are then loudly flouted as the undesirable and expendable byproducts of a free society, instead of being recognized and deplored as the signs of grave social ills.
For lack of a cohesive voice, the souls that haunt all the Gehennas of the cosmos -- apathetic if not inert -- will continue to rely on people who know how to stir their messianic hopes of deliverance from the here-and-now but who spend their time polishing the next speech instead of cleaning up the shit, which is what they were appointed to do in the first place.
Most will be content to live with slogans instead of stirring from the stupor of their political gullibility. Egalitarianism does not work in a vacuum. It requires active participation by all. Its tender shoots will wilt so long as people continue to bask in the feeble light of a fuzzy ideology instead of becoming its mirror. A basic right of democracy, and a key responsibility, is to make leaders accountable for their words, responsible for their broken promises, punishable for their lies. I could stand on the old weather-worn bridge and lecture the people of Gehenna, fanning their resentment, stirring their wilted passions, urging them that long overdue is a paroxysm of nausea, a loud, collective spasm of revulsion at the vampires impaled at their throats. I could convince them that time has come to slam the shutters open and exclaim loud and clear: “We’re mad as hell and we won’t take it anymore.” Not the blight and the crumbling sidewalks, not the garbage and the lung-crunching pollution, not the power outages, unregulated traffic, police corruption, influence peddling, drug-running and money laundering, not the gangs and child predators and human traffickers, not the inept and fossilized officialdom, not the Byzantine bureaucracy, lofty promises, limp excuses, words, words, words, not Ein Sof where is mirrored with unbearable realism the lunatic ambivalence of the human spirit.
But such outbursts are dramatized on celluloid in cinemas where the masses purge themselves on Saturday nights or in the bars where the national bile is habitually drowned or on TV where inanity packaged for the hoi polloi turns the brain to mush. At the polls, where the democratic process has been reduced to a thoughtless ritual, there will be no surprises. It will be business as usual. Voters will opt for the “least worst” and hope for the best. That’s the safe way out. Convictions are easily subverted by sheepish conformity. In the rush to find whom to blame for their woes, the good people of Gehenna will ultimately exorcise and exonerate their tormentors. There is comfort in “perpetuity.” It helps deaden hopeless dreams.