I wasn’t supposed to be born.
Mickey Z. -- World News Trust
Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009
"For
what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own
soul? What shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” --
Matthew 16:26
I wasn’t supposed to be born. After my mother gave birth to
my sister, the doctors told her she’d never have another child. They couldn’t
say exactly why (later, she was diagnosed with endometriosis) but they were
pretty damn certain…the way doctors tend to be pretty damn certain. Wisely, my
mother ignored such white coat condescension and less than two years later,
yours truly arrived on the scene. Mom called me her “miracle baby” and I think
this played a role in the amazingly close relationship we always had.
In the U2 song “Sometimes You Can’t Make It On Your Own,”
Bono warbles: “That’s all right, we’re the same soul.” This simple line has
given me the poetic license to imagine that my mother defied the medical odds
by choosing to “share her soul” (so to speak) with me. This selfless act is
what made it possible for me to be born and
for us to have been such good friends.
We’re the same soul…
When my mother passed away last year, I found another quote
to help me deal with the devastating loss of my soul mate. This one from the
Tom Joad character in “Grapes of Wrath.”
Tom sez: “Maybe we’re not all individual souls, but maybe
we’re all part of one big soul.”
Again, so incredibly basic but within that simplicity lies the secret: If we were to look upon all
living things as part -- along with ourselves -- of one collective soul, it becomes
impossible to live in denial about war, global poverty and disease, oppression,
the destruction of our eco-system, etc. It becomes unbearable to visualize
animals in a slaughterhouse, a laboratory, a circus, or a zoo. For anyone
dwelling anywhere near the realm of reality, it is downright excruciating to
contemplate 80 percent of the world’s forest and 90 percent of the large fish in the ocean
being gone. If we are indeed “all part of one big soul,” as Tom Joad wonders,
how can we not weep uncontrollably when -- on this planet of abundant resources -- a
human being starves to death every two seconds?
Yet this is precisely the type of brutal culture we have
helped create and, as a result, we are now haunted by billions and billions of
lost souls. The souls of the victims of war, of greed, of our callous
indifference and denial. Human and animal souls…and souls with roots, too. We
are haunted by the souls of 100 animal and plant species going extinct each and
every day. Souls like those of the Dusky Seaside Sparrow.
Once found mainly on Florida’s Merritt Island, the dusky
seaside sparrow had its salt marsh habitat sprayed with DDT and cleared so it
could be taken over by the space program. The last Dusky died in 1987.
We could all live more easily in a world without NASA but
instead we’re stuck on a planet devoid of dusky seaside sparrows (and soon
devoid of polar bears, California condors, Woodland caribou, whooping cranes,
wolverines, etc.).
Our irrational behavior has corrupted Tom Joad’s
hypothetical “one big soul” but perhaps -- as I like to visualize my Mom doing -- we
can offer new life to the myriad lost souls by sharing and giving more of
ourselves. We can do this by waking up, by remembering, by speaking out, by no
longer playing the role of silent partnership as everything is consumed or
poisoned or destroyed.
Do it for yourself. Do it for the planet. Do it for the
future. Do it for the tortured souls, the victims of human progress (sic).
To give a voice and a new life to all those lost souls is to
see ourselves, as Subcommandante Marcos once suggested:
“Marcos is gay in San Francisco,
black in South Africa, an Asian in Europe, a Chicano in San Ysidro, an
anarchist in Spain, a Palestinian in Israel, a Mayan Indian in the streets of
San Cristobal, a gang member in Neza, a rocker in the National University, a
Jew in Germany, an ombudsman in the Defense Ministry, a communist in the
post-Cold War era, an artist without gallery or portfolio. A pacifist in
Bosnia, a housewife alone on Saturday night in any neighborhood in any city in
Mexico, a striker in the CTM, a reporter writing filler stories for the back
pages, a single woman on the subway at 10 p.m., a peasant without land, an
unemployed worker, an unhappy student, a dissident amid free market economics,
a writer without books or readers, and, of course, a Zapatista in the mountains
of southeast Mexico. So Marcos is a human being, any human being, in this
world. Marcos is all the exploited, marginalized, and oppressed minorities,
resisting and saying, 'Enough'!”
He could’ve added: “Marcos is a dusky
seaside sparrow in Florida.”
Or perhaps Eugene V. Debs said it
best: “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal
element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.”
I’ll see you on the front lines,
comrades. Don’t forget to bring your soul…
Mickey Z. can be found on the Web at http://www.mickeyz.net