I think I feel too much. Maybe I spend too much time on reddit.com. Maybe I’m just cursed by being an Aquarian. Or perhaps I am just human. But how can I be human and share my humanity with people like these terrorists in Mumbai? How can my life be filled with love, hope and beauty while so many lives are void of all those things? Where is the disconnect, the great divide? 

I just spent the last 20 minutes looking at these photos from Mumbai; I’ve been moved to tears many times by human tragedy so I wasn’t surprised to find myself a complete wreck after looking at these. I am an incredibly soft humanitarian and I feel the pain in the world every day. I carry it with me like an emo 14 year old myspace addict. When I look at my own children smiling I can’t help but remind myself that there are children just as beautiful as my own that are crying, being beaten, raped, or neglected at that very moment. When I go to the store to buy groceries I think about all of the families out there that don’t have money to buy groceries to feed their children. When I walk outside on a cold Maine winter evening and feel the icy air rip through my bones I feel sad for the people that don’t have a way to escape that cold, no homes to keep them warm. When I buy clothes for my kids at a department store I think about the tiny, fragile hands that made the clothes for only a few cents a day. I think about how my own country has destroyed the natural environment and economic structure of third world nations so that we could pay as little as $3.99 for a shirt at walmart when in the real world you couldn’t even buy a yard of fabric for that little money and make it yourself. 

My husband thinks I’m totally nuts. I drive myself insane because I can’t rationalize all of the chaos out there and I can’t find a way to contribute to the solution. He reminds me gently that I am contributing my raising two children with so much love and patience because someday they will inherit this world. He is right, but it doesn’t make me feel any better about the horrific things that are happening.

And as everything falls apart, as our humanity frays at its seams, the American consumer just goes right on consuming. They run in their hamster wheels and their scenery never changes because they refuse to look beyond their own borders and their own fabricated reality. We are losing our civilized world. We are falling victim to the savagery that is born through hateful dogma, consumerism, and our lack of presence within our children’s lives.

We work so much because we need to pay bills. We need to pay bills because we have been made to feel as though we “need” certain things like two cars per household, lots of name brand clothes, the newest technologies, new furniture, candle sconces, new coordinating bath rugs and shower curtains, on and on. We need these things because the TV tells us we need them. Our neighbors have them. Our friends have them. We must have them. We must assimilate. So we consume. And it never ends. We’re never happy. We are slaves to jobs that most of us hate and we work to pay for things that we turn around and sell in a lawn sale at 10% of its original price a year later. In the meantime, we’ve left our homes empty. Our children are forgotten. And when we are not there to nourish them emotionally and provide a stable foundation of love and support they turn to TV, computer games, myspace communities, and other forms of support and get lost in the confusing web of unattached support systems. 

I am overburdened by the sadness in the world. I cannot understand hatred because I’ve never truly felt it. I just want peace, understanding, diversity, and acceptance. I want that for all of us. Isn’t the need to love and be loved a part of all of us? When I sit quietly in the rocking chair as I nurse my baby boy, my thoughts wander. Many times I have looked into his dark, dreamy eyes and wondered how anyone could not love a child like I love my own. And I wonder how anyone that is this loved could ever grow up to do so much damage later in life. I don’t think they could. I think that love and peace must start between a mother and her child, and then blossom from there. I can’t think of any better way to cleanse the world of hatred than to hold our sweet children close to us, rock them gently, and allow ourselves to love them with every cell in our body.