"There's not enough years underneath this belt, for me to admit the way that I felt." -Seven Mary Three
I’m on the train on the way home from our Nation’s capital, stopped because the train ahead of us has broken down, and we have to take on all of their passengers so they can clear the broken train and two trains worth of passengers can get to New York City sometime after midnight. The poor people on the broken train! Who knows how long they have been stuck here, wherever we are, thinking they should be at home in bed by now or soon after so to get a good night’s sleep before Monday morning hits us all like a ton of bricks. But instead transferring trains in the dead of night in the middle of… wherever we are.
Announcements of train-transferring have fallen on my deaf ears because I’m having writer’s remorse regarding my Wednesday afternoon blog post. Thoughtfully, the shy twentyish-year-old guy next to me gently nudged my elbow to inform me of the reason for our stop. I must looked confused because I am confused, but not about my train stopping.
Poking fun at my inability to arrive on time has proven funny but also truly easy to write about. When people asked me how long it took me to write my first post, I lied and said an hour. It took fifteen minutes…maybe. Today is Sunday, May 18, at 11:07 p.m., and I’m not sure if or when I’ll post this because the dissonant feeling I have regarding my light-hearted, ditzy blog post is much harder to deconstruct. In as few words as possible lies my meager attempt...
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Find a Sunday, May 18th New York Times, turn to page 8 in International Report, and tell me what you see. I spy a picture of a mother and child who have reportedly been void of electricity and clean water for days. To the right, a quote that reads “For lonely survivors, the threat of disease and forced labor,” referring to child cyclone survivors. Then (and by then I mean first, but didn’t want to admit it) I see an advertisement that says “Discover the wonder.” atop a bright indulgent photo ofa cute young boy next to an even cuter bottle-nosed dolphin. Recap: On the same page in the most prestigious newspaper in the country, a picture of a mother and baby who are in need of food and water adjacent to an advertisement depicting a young boy, the same age as those threatened by disease and forced labor, and a dolphin swimming in gleeful bliss.
And in true white Anglo-Saxon, ultra-privileged nature, I think of myself.
How can I write about buttery leather bags in Bergdorf, when the sleeping Burmese mother on page 8 of “All the News That’s Fit to Print” attempts life in a shelter in an area that hasn’t seen water, electricity or nutritional relief since the cyclone? Am I so shallow that my entrance into the world of cyberspace, however late it may seem to my peers, is sparkling with triviality?
(Oh, I’m in New Jersey. Duh.)
Econ mavens unite! Is that how it works? Should I continue to “help” our economy despite the cognitive dissonance it produces when, wearing Nike running shorts and holding a Starbucks latte, I browse international tragedies in the Sunday paper? How am I supposed to tame my aggravation to a smooth emotional state? And more importantly, which portion of my money am I supposed to give to help natural disasters that leave people at the dead bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and which portion should quench the thirst of our economy so that, under proper administration and harmonious idealism, we can help others?
This is the dilemma I am faced with on a post-paper reading Sunday night trek home from the District. I’m not sure there is an answer, but for all purposes egocentric, I have reached a most nebulous conclusion. Maybe I write about lateness, um earliness, so that the cartographer bogged down crafting relief maps all day and night can treat herself to humor with a side of raw ridiculousness at the end of a natural-disaster infested week.
Loved the post, though the realization of the problems faced with most of the world are too deep for me to contemplate fully on my return to the world from Memorial Day vacation weekend.
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Distraction from reality is just as important as facing the reality itself.
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dillemily dinzebach-is that your alliterative superhero name? it is great, albeit jarring, to hear the grown-up, travelled and matured version of the voice i haven't spoken to in, sickeningly, over a decade.
I think I'll try to respond here regularly, if for no more reason than that crafting a reply is as entertaining as your entries themselves.
As far as the greater moral question of your post, all I hope is that though you've identified the unavoidable hypocrisy of downloading a Starbucks-spotlight iTunes download-of-the-day while simultaneously googling the latest CNN.com Darfur update; i hope you can learn to ignore that hypocrisy (to some extent) as well. after all, while it could be argued that more net good would have been accomplished had Bob Dylan spent his hours devoted to feeding starving children instead of hunched over his piano and harmonica writing songs, I don't think the the world would have been better off for it.
this is already too long. this is your blog not mine.
did i say a decade? can we even be old enough to be able to say something like that? oy.
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