Happily Ever After

I sat in the gymnasium at an Oakland elementary school this morning (btw, it’s now called a “multi-purpose room” – I said gymnasium to some kids last week and they looked at me like I was from Mars) and I listened to one hundred or so 3rd and 4th graders put on a play about their ancestors. Aside from two teachers, the project director and the theater director, I was the only white person in the room. The children walked on stage in groups of twenty and, three or four at a time, they acted out stories they had collected from their mothers, fathers, and grandparents, putting together a “Family Tree.”

The children were nervous and rambunctious and could hardly keep quiet for two minutes, but their stories were beautiful and heart-breaking, and showed me once again how powerful the human spirit truly is, and how bravely we all live our lives, though we show our courage in such different ways.

“I survived hurricanes and tornadoes.” “Crossing the American border – no food for six weeks.” “We loved our country, but had no money and no job. We had no shoes.” “Three hundred people in a truck with no ventilation or air conditioning and we immediately started to suffocate.” “You could smell the birds and the rain, and the wet ground and the sadness from leaving my country.” “I survived a gang shootout.” “I came to America because of war. I escaped from Laos to Thailand. I walked a long way to a refugee camp.” “I got caught by the cops and spent 8 days in jail, but I was in America. Thank God.” “My great-great-great grandma cleaned house for a white doctor in the South. This was in 1937 when whites and blacks were not equal. The doctor’s son knew that my great-great- grandmother was afraid of snakes, but he threw one on her. She got mad and beat the boy up. In those days blacks were killed for doing things like that. My great-great-great grandmother had to take her two children and catch a train to California at night to save her daughter’s life.”

Parents sat in the audience listening to these 8 and 9 year olds recount their traumas, their desperate experiences, their most challenging times. They sat proudly while their children wiggled and talked too fast and giggled at themselves and each other. As I watched, it struck me how little we often know about each other - how de-personalized our experience is in this country at this moment in time. We know what we see in our own community, sure, but beyond that, and even inside of that, we are often more familiar with what we see on TV, on the internet, on our Gameboys and PlayStations.

What would we do if we knew that our neighbor’s mother and father had spent six weeks without food, walking a thousand miles through coyote-infested deserts, raging rivers, crossing hostile borders just so they could have a 600 square foot house with running water for their family? What would we think about them then? What are we thinking about our own families? Have we lost sight of our own ancestors’ hardships?

I really want to forget the negative parts of our history. Our country is practically founded on forgetting. The Melting Pot. The American Dream. Come on over to the Promised Land where you can start anew, and anyone can become anything if they just work hard enough. I want to believe in the American ideal and focus on the future. But in forgetting those negative parts, many of which have not been gone that long (some would say they still aren’t gone at all), don’t we lose sight of each other’s courage? Don’t we miss out on huge parts of who we are, where we came from, how much valor exists in each one of us?

It’s hard to comprehend 6 billion stories of hardship and courage. It’s much easier to categorize people into several nice pat stereotypes and file them away in our internal warning systems – better watch out for those people –they’re dangerous! But maybe it’s not easier. I mean, it definitely is hard for us to imagine how brave people have to be, because it’s so overwhelming to the human spirit to think of how much pain we all live through. To feel that much empathy – well, it could drown us. It could make us feel hopeless about the odds of having a Happily Ever After, which after all, is what we secretly crave, isn’t it? So to not feel it – to deny the pain’s existence – feels easier.

But really – let’s look at that. To deny the existence of pain in the world, to deny the truth that every human heart is required to be brave at least some of the time, actually takes quite a bit of work. First we have to see the pain someone is experiencing and shut down our own feelings around it. This is a feat in and of itself. It takes emotional maneuvering – twisting what we see so we don’t have to bear the thought of such injustice or pain – it must be their fault, they must be lazy, they brought it on themselves. Once we’ve justified the story, and stuffed our feelings of sadness, outrage, and pain deep down inside, then we have to work constantly to keep the feelings from leaking out. So we overeat, we drink, we play video games and watch insane amounts of TV, we cruise the internet for hours. We argue over trivial little things so that the bigness of the world’s pain is kept at bay.

Wouldn’t it truly be easier to sigh a collective sad sigh, give each other a hug and move on? Wouldn’t it really honestly be easier to cry for a few minutes, an hour, whatever, and then help each other on down the road together?

It seems to me that hiding and denying and managing our feelings is far more work than just having them, as they are, in front of whoever’s watching, shame be damned. If we did, perhaps people would see our struggles and judge us less. Perhaps people would know the stories of our ancestors and ourselves for that matter because we wouldn’t need to keep such distance. Perhaps we’d be able to connect and honor each other and have world peace and all that good stuff. That’d be my Happily Ever After.