Small Wonder (20 page)

First what goes without saying and has to be said: I would want my husband and children to know I loved them. But they know this every minute of our lives, from the way I have always lived—for them, with them, in every way cheering them on;
with
them even when I've had to be apart from them. Every survivor must seize this comfort. And I would hope all members of my family—including those who are unrelated by blood but who've proven themselves to be my devoted tribe in good times and bad—would remember what fine people they have been in my eyes, and carry that reinforcement into the rest of their days. That is the best reincarnation I can imagine: to be a cricket on someone's hearth, a small, encouraging light in the heart of a friend who looks at the world and its challenges as I would.

And my daughters, as precious as my eyes: I would have them be brave enough, and gentle enough, to remember me by embracing the world and engaging in its design. I wouldn't need to know how they'd do it, only that they would earn the unquenchable happiness that comes to those who leave a place more beautiful, somehow, for their having walked through it.

I would want someone to plant a raft of poppies for me.

It is one thing to imagine the gentle end that most of us envision for ourselves, with our survivors at our bedside; to imagine
death by violence, and its aftermath, demands a magnitude of labor I can scarcely marshal. A murder is an unspeakable thing to have to pack away in a human heart. It brings the temptation to bitterness, a particular pain that cries out to be healed with pain. There comes a momentary sense of conviction: that some other's anguish will erase our own. I have felt that rage myself, when I was attacked by someone who did not care if I lived or died; I've felt it even more fiercely on the occasion of harm, real or threatened, to my children. I still sometimes feel an intense longing, as sharp as the knife that once touched my ribs, to hurt another person. I felt it, of course, after September 11. Even now the feeling rises like the undead, adapts like a germ to new bodies and forms, tries to pass itself off as righteous at times. I struggle to forgive the unforgivable and doubt I am up to the task.

But I have lived long enough and had the help of wise enough friends to feel how the stones in my heart can settle when the substrate of my rage transforms into a kinder species of force. Sometimes I've survived anger only one minute at a time, by saying to myself again and again that the best revenge is some kind of life beyond this, some kind of goodness. And I can lay no claim to goodness until I can prove that mean people have not made me mean.

This transformation isn't easy; possibly nothing is harder. In the days after September 11, my mind led me repeatedly to the edge of tasting my own death at the hands of a heartless murderer, though never into the more awful terrain, of which I can hardly make myself speak, of surviving the loss of a child. I was brought to tears during those weeks by the expansive grace of some of the parents who did lose sons and daughters on those airplanes and in those buildings. Oscar Rodriguez, whose son died in the World Trade Center, said, “I know there is anger. I feel it myself. But I don't want my son used as a pawn to justify the killing of others. We as a nation should not use the same means as the people who
attacked us.” And a bereaved mother in Washington, D.C., was able to assemble the composure, only days after her daughter's murder, to speak publicly of her gratitude for the years she had been given with her twelve-year-old, rather than reviling the men who had stolen the many more years she might have had. Rita Lasar, the sister of a man who died on the twenty-seventh floor of one of the towers because he stayed with a wheelchair-bound coworker while others fled, brought me to know her grief when she wrote of having helped raise her much younger, much-beloved brother. And she brought me to understand the magnitude of her love when she declared eloquently, as our country rushed toward war, “I will stay behind, just as my dear brother Avrame did. I will stay behind and ask America not to do something we can't take back.” These loving family members are a monument. To take them at their word is to understand what is possible from the human spirit.

There can be no greater spiritual accomplishment than to come through brutal trials and then look back and see that mean times did not render us mean spirits. If I had never been granted the chance to do this, I would still want it for my children. Of all the fates I can imagine for myself, no legacy leaves me colder than that of bitterness and hatred. I would rather be forgotten entirely than held in any way responsible for the vengeful loss of a single life, let alone thousands of lives, or any historic moment of jingoism or ethnic hatred. I feel chilled and forsaken when I picture kissing my children good-bye some morning and, by nightfall, having all the beauty of my days reduced to a symbol claimed by military men as an act of war. No bomb has ever been built that can extinguish hatred, and while I have been told that this is not the point, I insist on it as
my
point, if one is ever to be made for me. Vengeance does not subtract any numbers from the equation of murder; it only adds them. Empathy, comprehension, resolution—these are the only powers for murder's reduction. Who would really wish to be
a cause for taking bread from the mouths of the hungry in a desperate rush to beat more of the world's plowshares into swords? That is surely a despicable memorial. I speak for many more than myself, I know, when I declare that I'd rather be remembered as a lesson learned, a sympathy made acute, a moment in which humanity rose humanely to a fearful occasion.

A close friend of mine in Virginia who is also a mother and writer, with whom I have shared the struggle against the culturally complex anachronisms of Dixie, wrote me a few days after the fall with this report: “Even the Confederate flags are at half mast.” That sentence struck me as a poem, complete in itself.

Maybe we've had the wind taken out of our sails for just long enough that our course will realign, however infinitesimally, toward a kinder star. We would not be making a concession to murder or its perpetrators if we were to learn from our fears and our losses. Martin Luther King Jr., four little girls from Selma, and hundreds of other murdered souls in our history have given us a pause in which to examine the national conscience and embrace a more generous vision of ourselves than we ever thought possible. That must be our monument to the lost.

I've lived long enough to eat many youthful words, but a few things I have always known for certain, and this is one: If I had to give up my life for anything, it would have to have the resilience of hope, the elation of new literacy, the brilliant life of a field of flowers, the elementary kindness of bread. Nothing short of that. It would have to be something as sure as love.

I
was headed home with my mind on things; I can't even say what they were. It was an afternoon not very long ago, and probably I was ticking through the routine sacrament of my day—locating every member of my family at that moment and organizing how we would all come together for dinner and what I would feed us—when my thoughts were bluntly interrupted. A woman was being attacked fifty feet away from me. My heart thumped and then seemed to stop for good and then thumped hard again as I watched what was
happening. The woman was slight, probably no taller than my older daughter, but she was my age. Her attacker, a much taller man, had no weapon but was hitting her on the head and face with his fists and open hands, screaming, calling her vile names right out in the open. She ducked, in the way any animal would, to save the more fragile bones of her face. She tried to turn her back on him, but he pursued her, smacking at her relentlessly with the flat of his hand and shouting angrily that she was trash, she was nothing, she should get away from him. And she was trying, but she couldn't. I felt my body freeze as they approached. They came very close, maybe ten feet away or even less, and then they moved on past us. I say
us
because I wasn't alone here: I was in a crowd of several dozen people, all within earshot. Maybe there were closer to a hundred of us; I'm not sure. Unbelievably, most weren't even looking. And then I did my own unbelievable thing: I left. I moved forward toward my home and family and left that battered woman behind.

I did and I didn't leave her behind, because I'm still thinking and now writing about this scene, reviling my own cowardice. Reader, can you believe I did what I did? Does it seem certain that I am heartless?

Let me give some more details of the scene, not because I hope to be forgiven. I ask only that all of us try to find ourselves in this weird landscape. It was the United States of America. I was at a busy intersection, in a car. The woman had the leathery, lined face and tattered-looking hair of a person who lives her whole life outdoors beneath the sun. So did her attacker. Both of them wore the clothes that make for an instantly recognizable uniform: shirts and pants weathered by hard daily wear to a neutral color and texture. Her possessions, and his, were stuffed into two bulky backpacks that leaned against a signpost in a median dividing six lanes of city traffic. I was in the middle lane of traffic on one side. All of the other people in this crowd were also in automobiles, on either side
of me, opposite me, ahead and behind, most of them with their windows rolled up, listening to the radio or talking on cell phones. From what I could tell, no one else was watching this woman get beaten up and chased across three, then six, then nine separate lanes of traffic in the intersecting streets. I considered how I could get out of my car (should I leave it idling? lock it? what?) and run toward this woman and man, shouting at him to stop, begging the other drivers to use their phones to call the police. And then, after I had turned over this scenario in my mind for eight or nine seconds, the light changed and every car but mine began to move, and I had to think instead about the honking horns, the blocked traffic, the public nuisance I was about to become, and all the people who would shake their heads at my do-gooder foolishness and inform me that I should stay away from these rough-looking characters because this was obviously a domestic dispute.

But that could not have been true. It was not domestic.
Domestic
means “of the home,” and these people had no home. That was the problem—theirs, mine, everybody's. These people were beneath or somehow outside the laws that govern civil behavior between citizens of our country. They were homeless.

In his poem “Death of a Hired Man,” Robert Frost captured in just a few words the most perfect definition of home I've ever read:

I wish I could ever have been so succinct. I've spent hundreds of pages, even whole novels, trying to explain what home means to me. Sometimes I think it's the only thing I ever write about. Home is place, geography, and psyche; it's a matter of survival and safety, a condition of attachment and self-definition. It's where you learn from your parents and repeat to your children all the
stories of what it means to belong to the place and people of your ken. It's a place of safety—and that is one of the most real and pressing issues for those who must live without it. For homeless women and men, the probability of being sexually assaulted or physically attacked is so great that it's a matter not of
if
but of
when
. Homelessness is the loss first of community and finally of the self. It seems fatuous that I could spend so much time contemplating the subtle nuances of home (let alone buy a magazine devoted to home remodeling or decor) when there are people near me—sometimes only a few feet away from me—who don't have one, can't get one, aren't even in the picture.

Tucson, the city where I live most of the time, is often said to be a Mecca for homeless people. I don't like this use of the term “Mecca” because it suggests a beautiful holy land and a trip undertaken to fulfill the needs of the spirit. Whereas thousands of men, women, and children undertake the long journey to Tucson each winter for one reason only: to fulfill the need of the body to lie on the ground overnight without freezing to death. They come here for raw survival; their numbers swell each October and then remain through each following summer a little higher than the year before. Increasingly they have become a presence among us, ignored by most of us, specifically banned by our laws from certain places where the city council has decided their panhandling may interfere with commerce. They are banned mostly, I think, because their presence is a pure, naked shame upon us all.

Whatever else “home” might be called, it must surely be a fundamental human license. In every culture on earth, the right to live in a home is probably the first condition of citizenship and humanity. Homelessness is an aberration. It may happen anywhere from time to time, of course, but when I look hard at the world, I see very few places where there resides an entire, permanent class of people labeled “homeless.” Not in the poorest places I've ever lived, not even in an African village where everyone I
knew owned only one shirt (at best) and most had never touched an automobile. Because even there, as long as the social structure remains intact, people without resources are taken in by their families. Even if someone should fall completely apart and have to go to the hospital, which means a trek on foot over dozens of miles or more, the whole family goes along to make sure the sick one is taken care of. “Home,” in this case, becomes portable. I know this because I lived as a child in an African village that housed the region's small, concrete-block hospital. Whenever I walked past, the hospital's lively grounds never failed to impress me. It was just a bare-dirt plaza, maybe stretching among all its corners to the size of a city block, but it was always a busy place, where dozens of families camped out around their cooking fires while waiting for some relative to have an operation, have a baby, or die. Meanwhile they passed the time by singing, mourning, washing dishes, arguing, daydreaming, or fussing at toddlers who ran around wearing nothing but strings of beads around their bellies. In the rest of my life I have never witnessed another scene so solidly founded on both poverty and security. I don't wish to glorify the impoverished half of this equation; these children had swollen bellies from kwashiorkor, and they had parasites. But they also had families they could not forget under any circumstances, or ever abandon, or be abandoned by, however they might fall on madness or illness or hard times. I don't believe that the word
homeless
as it's used in our language could be translated there.

In most cultures I have known or read about, the provision of home is considered to be the principal function and duty of human family. In rich countries other than ours, such as Japan, the members of the European Community, and Canada, the state assumes this duty as well; their citizens pay higher taxes than we do, and so the well-off live with a little less. Generally speaking, the citizens of these nations have smaller homes, smaller cars, and smaller appetites for consumer goods than we do. And to balance
it out they have a kind of security unknown to U.S. citizens—that is, the promise that the state will protect every citizen from disaster. A good education, good health care, and good shelter are fairly well guaranteed, even to those who have devastating illness or bad luck. The Revised European Social Charter of the Council of Europe (1996) states in Article 34: “In order to combat social exclusion and poverty, the Union recognizes and respects the right to social and housing assistance to ensure a decent existence for all those who lack sufficient resources.” More recently, at the Lisbon Summit in March 2000, heads of the fifteen European Union countries agreed to develop a common strategy for providing universal access to decent and sanitary housing. These civilized nations have long agreed that homelessness simply isn't an option.

Where
does
homelessness exist? On the border between the Congo and Rwanda when those countries are engaged in protracted civil war. In Kosovo, for the same reason. In India, wherever the construction of a massive dam has inundated villages. In Kenya and other parts of Africa, where large numbers of children have lost their entire extended families to AIDS. Many were also homeless in Somalia during the drought, in the Philippines after the volcanic explosion, in Mexico City after the earthquake. In other words, homelessness as a significant problem occurs in countries stricken by war, famine, plague, and natural disaster. And here, in the USA. Why are we not carrying on with ourselves, our neighbors, and the people who represent us the conversation that begins with the question,
What on earth is wrong with us?

This is a special country, don't we know it. There are things about the way we organize our society that make it unique on the planet. We believe in liberty, equality, and whatever it is that permits extravagant housing developments to be built around my hometown at the rate of one new opening each week (“Model
homes, 6 bedrooms, 3-car garages, starting from the low $180s!”), while fully 20 percent of children on my county's record books live below the poverty level. Nationwide, though the homeless are a difficult population to census, we can be sure they number more than one million. How does the rest of the world keep a straight face when we go riding into it on our latest white horse of Operation-this-or-that-kind-of-Justice, and everyone can see perfectly well how we behave at home? Home is where all justice begins.

More than a decade ago, a government study discovered the surprising fact that some 10 percent of American families appeared to be destined for homelessness. These were working families with a household income, not qualifying for unemployment or other kinds of relief, but they had to spend more than 60 percent of that income on housing and heating; 44 percent of it on food; and 14 percent on medical care. It doesn't take higher math to show they were having to go into debt, deeper each month, to stay alive. This truth was demonstrated dramatically in more recent years by Barbara Ehrenreich, who gave two years of her life at the end of the 1990s to the challenge of surviving on the best wages she could find as an unskilled worker, and then writing about it in her remarkable book
Nickeled and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
When workers earning minimum wage can no longer meet their bills, they must decide which of the following things to give up: housing, food, medical care. That is one of the several life histories we call, collectively, the American way.

The figures above came from a book by Arthur Blaustein, who was appointed by President Carter in 1977 to chair the National Advisory Council on Economic Opportunity. The council was abolished in 1981 by the Reagan administration, which didn't like the council's findings. But Blaustein published the work anyway, in his book
The American Promise
, which outlines our nation's disastrous approach to dealing with poverty. In his introduction he mentions an interview between Bill Moyers and Robert Penn
Warren, a writer I'm proud to claim as a fellow Kentuckian, who was at that time America's Poet Laureate. Mr. Moyers asked Mr. Warren, “Sir, as one of our leading writers and philosophers, can you tell me how we can resolve the terrible crises that surround us: decaying cities, terrible health care, terrible crises in education and housing, and so much poverty?”

Mr. Warren leaned forward and said, “Well, Bill, for a beginning, I think it would be good if we would stop lying to one another.”

This is it. This is all. We so desperately avoid looking at the truth square on, much less saying it aloud, because it's uncomfortable for us to go about our days in relative luxury while people next door to us are dying for lack of shelter. Civic pride can lose its shine when reality is allowed a place at the table. I find it unspeakably hard to walk past someone whose life would be improved, noticeably, by the amount of spare change I could probably find on the floor of my car.