Earth’s Old and Weary Cry

We don’t have time to mourn the dead. Tragedies such as the carnage in Orlando should bring us together to grieve for those who died, to pray, however we pray, for the wounded, and to support those whose lives have been devastated. But we don’t have time. Too quickly we turn human tragedies into political events, into opportunities to advance our own agendas, to reinforce our hardening divisions. Yes, I believe we must ban assault weapons and pass sensible gun laws. But I don’t need an email from moveon.org asking me to sign a petition before the dead have even been identified.

I believe we need to confront the evil that is ISIS. But I don’t think we need calls for the president to resign because he won’t say, “radical Islam,” two words that have become, like so much else these days, politically loaded.

I believe it matters that the victims were gay and that they were killed celebrating life in a nightclub called Pulse. But more importantly, they were people whose lives ended horrifically and unexpectedly.

We should stop and grieve together for those people, at least for one day, and not just rewrite Monday’s speech to score a point. This is a time to put our differences aside and come together.

Today is the birthday of William Butler Yeats, the Irish poet and revolutionary. On this morning’s Writer’s Almanac, Garrison Keillor read a Yeats poem. It’s called The Sorrow of Love; its last stanza seems applicable to today.

And now the sparrows warring in the eaves, The curd-pale moon, the white stars in the sky, And the loud chanting of the unquiet leaves, Are shaken with earth's old and weary cry.

Grace, ‘The Final Chapter’

Winston Moseley died last week. He was 81 and had spent the last 51 years in prison for killing Kitty Genovese the night of March 13, 1964 in Queens, N.Y. It was a murder that seared America. Dozens of people heard Kitty’s screams but “didn’t want to get involved,” a response now known as the “Genovese syndrome,” which led to the adoption of 911. The original reports are in dispute, but not the horrific rape and murder (and not necessarily in that order) nor the hours-long agony of the 28-year-old woman. Kitty’s brother Bill was 16, and the murder of the sister he adored affected every aspect of his life. Not wanting to be an 'apathetic bystander,' he enlisted in the Marines out of high school and lost his legs in Vietnam. He spent the rest of his life trying to understand what happened that night in Queens, always seeking closure.

Yesterday his search came to an extraordinary end, which I lift verbatim from The New York Times.

To the Editor:

With Winston Moseley’s death comes, maybe, the final chapter in the tragic story of the events of the early morning of Friday, March 13, 1964.

As my mother would have wished, my family’s “better angels” do now express our condolences to the Moseley family, most especially to the Rev. Steven Moseley, one of Winston’s sons, a man of faith, love and courage, who struggled in his formative years with a stain and dilemma undeservedly forced onto his being.

May the spirit, in whom I believe that Kitty, and now Winston, reside, help resolve the eternal question: What do we owe to all our fellow beings? This is a question that each human being must strive to answer, one moment at a time. Let us join with the hope of shared egalitarian equanimity.

William J. Genovese

Washington, Conn.

Geezers (Old Friends)

The four of us have known each other for well over five decades, even longer for some, which has given our friendships the comfortable, broken-in fit of an old jacket. Our paths have diverged over the years. We have lived in different places and done different things, concentrated on our own families and careers, lost touch with parts of our pasts and even, over time, with each other. But with old friends the bonds persist. When we meet again, even after many years, we pick up where we left off, not needing to define ourselves nor explain our references. As we have grown older, we have come to savor these things, and so, four or five years ago we decided to get together for a long weekend at least once a year. A lot has changed, of course, and only in our own eyes do we look the same as we used to. But above all, it’s the laughter that brings us together, laughter that comes as easily as before but seems kinder now.

There are many benefits that come with growing old, from cheap movie tickets to grandchildren to the relief that we may yet escape the messes we humans have made in this world – to old friends, whose common memories remind us that the past is not gone. It has been incorporated into the arc of our lives, whose stories are yet unfinished. We get together every year because we have learned that old friends keep us young.

I Do

Being part of three weddings in three weeks focuses you on the meaning of marriage. Somehow, “a culturally sanctioned union [or legal contract] between spouses that establishes certain rights and obligations between the people, between them and their children, and between them and their in-laws" doesn’t begin to describe what I have witnessed. All three events had much in common, and each lay recognizably within the traditional ceremonies I have attended all my life. But I was struck by the uniqueness of each wedding and how it reflected each couple’s character and aspirations. And that, it seems to me, represents a profound change in how we view the institution itself. Each wedding was outdoors, in a beautiful and carefully chosen place. The vow was a personal statement, a conversation rather than a ritual. God was often optional, and the word “obey” was never uttered.

These are not incidental changes. To me they reflect a belief in marriage as a personal journey, rather than a communal duty or religious rite. Words that are carefully chosen make you think hard about what they mean, about what you are promising to each other. Marriage is a path you have chosen, often after a long courtship, and you have chosen it with care.

The role of the community is no longer to define the legal or cultural arrangements of marriage. Instead, the community is the ceremony itself, in which we have all come together to support two people on the journey they have chosen.

Levels of Intolerance

I was driving in rural Maine, channel surfing on my car radio, when the dial paused on an evangelical preacher (of which Maine radio has many). “I know some non-Christians who are nicer than some Christians,” he was saying, some who are kinder and friendlier. But they aren’t going to heaven, he continued. You don’t get there by being a nice person. There is only one way to heaven, and they aren’t on it. My takeaway: Enjoy these charming people while you can because you will never see them again. From my perspective this seems progress, if not exactly toleration, for at least the preacher is giving me a chance to get out of this world unrepentant. Of the next world he has no doubt, and I think of his heaven as a place where he can say “I told you so” for eternity.

For now, though, there exists the possibility of friendship between the saved and the damned, although marriage still seems off-limits.

For Zakia and Mohammad Ali, the young Afghan couple – Zakia a Sunni, he a Shiite – who fell in love and eloped, marriage isn’t just off-limits. In their families’ eyes, it's a capital offense. They have been in hiding, in jail and live in fear for their lives.

“After I get released,” Zakia told a Times reporter, “I hope we can have a happy life again and go and live in a place that is safe for us. If my family catches us, they won’t leave us alive.”

Praying for Charity

“Charity Hicks needs our prayers” was the email’s title. “I am writing with some sad news . . . Charity Hicks was in a hit-and-run car accident a week ago in New York City.” She is in a coma, on life support. Many of you know Charity from these pages. She is the Virgil who guided me through the hell that has become so much of Detroit – and she is the Beatrice who showed me often-hidden signs of hope. The granddaughter of Alabama sharecroppers recruited to come north to Detroit’s once-booming auto plants, she is a firebrand who has given her soul to the neighborhoods she loves and despairs for in equal measure. She has no illusions about the city in which she lost, first her job, and then her house, sold at auction to a bottom feeder who offered it back to her for a tidy profit – a city that, she says, “has given up on government” and spawned a generation of young men so marginalized they “would kill you without thinking about it.”

But despair always gives way to determination, to her belief that out of the rubble will grow a garden. She has dedicated her life to food security, and in a city where 150,000 people live outside the cash economy, she finds hope in Detroit’s 27 urban farms and 1,800 community gardens. More than hope: “There is power in these gardens,” she says. “They show our resilience and our resistance.”

May those qualities see her through now.

Let’s Take the Christ out of Christmas

I like to think of myself as a spiritual person, especially at this time of year when conspicuous consumption is in the air and pandemonium rules the malls. Others suggest that I am just cheap. In any event, I side with those who think it’s time to take the $ out of Chri$tmas. But why stop there? Let’s go all the way and take the Christ out of Christmas. Does this make me a warrior in the “war on Christmas” that Bill O’Reilly sees all across America, that has led Glenn Beck’s Nativity Defense Force to counterattack against liberals, atheists and Satanists? No. I love the story of Christmas: a young girl, about 14, rides into Bethlehem on the longest night of the year, accompanied by her companion, a carpenter. They go to an inn but are told there is no room. What were they thinking – a destitute couple, dirty from the road, the girl nine months pregnant? Of course there was no room for them. There still isn’t. So they go to a stable where the girl gives birth to a child, who will later rebel against the narrowness of his tribe and the oppression of the state – which will join together to silence him. This story is not a weapon in the culture wars or any other war. It is no more about sectarian exclusion than it is about material gluttony. It is a universal story of courage and hope and inclusion, of birth and rebirth.

Merry Christmas.

Casualties

Today is the 150^th anniversary of the third and last day of the Battle of Gettysburg, the turning point of the Civil War and the long-sought victory that drew Abraham Lincoln back to the battlefield in November to give the best (and the shortest) speech in American history. The battle provided instances of extraordinary valor, notably the defense of Little Round Top by the 20^th Maine Voluntary Infantry Regiment. Out of ammunition, they fixed bayonets, charged the regrouping Confederates and saved their comrades from being overrun. Overall, however, it was three days of horrendous carnage and the bloodiest fighting of the war – 8,000 dead, 27,000 wounded, 11,000 missing or captured – symbolized by Pickett’s charge, one of the most senseless wastes of human life in the history of warfare. As Southern infantrymen walked in lines across three-quarters of a mile of open field, Union guns on Cemetery Ridge annihilated them; almost half never came back. Yet even those figures pale next to the magnitude of loss suffered by the Granite Mountain Hotshots, 19 of whose 20 members were burned to death last Sunday as they fought a huge fire outside Yarnell, Arizona. Young men in the prime of their lives, with young wives and children, girlfriends and parents and extended families, gone in an agonizing moment, while the 20^th, the survivor, will be forever changed. Despite all the current cynicism about human selfishness, we still depend on those who act bravely on our behalf. All deaths are sad, but some just break your heart.

Love Story

“Old age ain’t for sissies,” Bette Davis, famously said. And she had a point. Things just don’t work as well as they used to. The body breaks down. The mind goes with it. And the memory? Don’t ask. “It ain’t what it used to be,” pitcher Dizzy Dean said of his right arm, “but what the hell is?” But if old age isn’t for sissies, neither is adolescence or middle age, early childhood or any other of the ages of man. And growing old has its compensations. We were lucky to get here, however broken down we are. And we have seen enough along the way to know the role luck played in the journey, which is the source of whatever wisdom we have. Knowing our days really are numbered can create a sense of gratitude and excitement for each one of them that perhaps the young don’t yet appreciate.

Last Saturday Ada Bryant and Robert Haire were married. He is 86. She is 97. As beautifully described by Margaux Laskey, their courtship was as filled with romance and fraught with angst as any other. “I didn’t think it was the thing to do because I don’t have that many years ahead of me,” said Ada. “But he said, ‘That’s all the more reason.’ I like him very much. I love him. So we’re going to be married.”

“Those who love deeply never grow old,” wrote Dorothy Canfield Fisher. “They may die of old age, but they die young.”