- If I were of a mind to respond to this columnist Mr.Connelly
in his vagary of advising dissenters to "listen", I would inform
him that it is exactly because of our "listening" that we have
no choice but to cry out!
-
- There is the "listening" to superficial banalities,
slogans, political posturing, gunghoism of might makes right, a chicken
in every pot, war makes peace, if your not for us your against us, color
coded fear, the empty babble of TV going on and on about the Jets losing!,
drunken stars, shoplifting tarts, jingoisms of commercials advising the
purchasing of third world junk, and the forever public relations scripted
scenarios of dusty, moth eaten, retired Generals, describing the latest
in annihilating-vaporizing weaponry that should make short shift of wiping
out the multitudes, "like tethered goats, they don't stand a chance"
(McCaffery). If not these, then some panel of mannequin-like think-tank
'experts' discussing the merits of vaporizing bombs, cluster bombs, drone
assassin planes, or rescuing the poor mud hutt, bedraggled citizens of
these ravaged lands into McFreedom, and McJustice for all! The fact that
these hostages to dictatorial madness, that we armed, might be blown to
smithereens in our all encompassing compassion to bring them into Western;
Gap-Niki-Big Mac-Pizza Hut-Wal-Mart Enlightenment is glossed over as "collateral
damage!"
-
-
- There is a "listening" that our dear Mr.Connelly
knows nothing of! Mr.Connelly may be excused for obviously not receiving
the 'gift'. It is the silent scream of the blood soaked earth, the silent
scream of those in cages, the silent scream of the disappeared ones, the
silent scream of the maimed and poisoned, the silent scream of those holding
a limbless-sightless dying child, the silent scream of those in sweat shop
factories, the silent scream of villages plundered and raped for their
oil-timber and minerals, the silent scream of skeletal hunger, the silent
scream of a babe at withered breast, the silent scream of the destitute,
the incarcerated, the napalmed, the gassed, the cannon fodder for grasping,
gilded greed, that the dissenters HEAR and give VOICE to! Man's arrogance-callousness-cruelty-hardened
hearts,indifference, apathy, smug elitism, detachment, and grasping insatiable
greed for money and power in the creating of unimaginable nuclear, vaporizing,
mutilating, micro-wave, radiated, biological, and chemical weaponry is
now global in scope! The silent scream is a daily and nightly caphoney
of horror to those who are gifted to "listen". We have now come
to the point in crazed madness that the whole of the earth trembles in
suspenseful dread of what man is about! The full of the earth and the
heavens are filled with man's technological creativity run amok threatening
all of mankind! I say, NO, Mr.Connelly it is you who are beyond "listening",
you and multitudes of others living in your bubble worlds of self deception
and denial serving in submissive acquiescence those who through some Utopian
delusion hold the power to destroy all that you hold dear! No, it is not
dissent that you hear Mr.Connelly but the "singers of life not of
death". Learn a lesson from nature Mr.Connelly. Loren Eisley tells
it best in his Judgement of the Birds-an experience he witnessed---listener
that he was!!
-
-
- "I have said that I saw a judgement upon life and
that it was not passed by human. I shall never see an episode like it again
if I live to be a hundred. You may put it that I had come over a mountain,
that I had slogged through fern and pine needles for half a long day, and
that on the edge of a little glade with one long, crooked branch extending
across it, I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through
accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.
The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away
into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in
the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way
that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral....There on the extended
branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.
-
- The sound that awoke me was the 'outraged cries' of the
nestling's parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing.
The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his
beak on the dead branch and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy
had followed the usual pattern. But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland,
a soft sound of complaint began to rise! Into the glade fluttered small
birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the
anguished parents. No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there
in some instinctive misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade
filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though
to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic
he had VIOLATED, that they knew. He was a bird of DEATH. And he, the murderer,
the black bird at the heart of life, sat there, glistening in the common
light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.
-
-
- "The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgement.
It was the judgement of life against death. I will never see it again so
forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically
prolonged. For in the midst of PROTEST, they forgot about the VIOLENCE.
There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly
in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song,
and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully
at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly
they took HEART and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are
known to sing. They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful.
They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth, they
had forgotten about the raven, for they were the SINGERS OF LIFE NOT DEATH.
-
-
- And there you have it Mr.Connolly, what you would so
benignly and cavalierly dismiss as just 'racket' the noise of 'dissent'.
No, my dear man...."we cry in some instinctive misery, the bereaved
and the unbereaved. We are the singers of life and not death." Listen!
jm
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