Speaking Helpless
“I struggled to find words to express my horror and grief after the discovery of these remains of 215 First Nations children...
I realized it’s because there are no words that can do justice to those children, and the countless others who died alone and scared, far from home or from the families who loved them.”
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Dear Kate,
You are a very wordy person. I wonder if you ever wondered why.
Who were your intended audience? What were the many words for?
I imagine first for yourself, with the thinly veiled pretense that they were for the good of others. Speaking is therapy, talking ourselves out of troubles we know we can't really talk ourselves out of, its futility tempts us to mistake quantity for quality, verbosity for veracity, facts for truth, prose for poetry.
Still, if we fail to speak, there might be more troubles.
See the quote above? Dr. Henry started off good. She could have stopped there and asked for a moment of silence. She could have let that moment of silence speak into the eternal silence we all face, for us to acknowledge, together, being kind and calm and safe for each other, that the tongue with which we seek to speak is a tongue that eludes us.
Still, she needed to speak. She was on the podium and people wanted words of hope. Now that we (think we) know the So, we must plunge ourselves into the So Whats. We have the facts (truth?) on our hands, and we must do something with them, we must action on them.
"For today I don’t offer words, but rather, my renewed commitment to actions that arrest and disrupt our deeply rooted ideologies of settler supremacy," she continued. These are noble words, good enough. But good enough for what?
The 215 children won't come back. Changing the future (if we are naive enough to think we can) is not going to address the past--nowhere close to adequately. Even if words could resurrect them, what do we as a society have to offer them?
Look at the children around us, yours and mine, what do they have in store for them? What is our vision of human flourishing, personally and together? (We are "in this together," remember?) Are we going to offer them BTS meals? And this is not even a joke: not only I've been asked three times this weekend if I had it already, but it also is an apt metaphor for the mass disintegration of our modern world, that you know as much as I that whatever in the paper bag is the same grease and sugar with a different packaging, another same-old superhero movie offered to anyone and everyone from the cradle to the grave, we would still need to somehow fall for the offering to get along in this world, to speak a word with our life, a word that others would listen and think us agreeable and reasonable for it.
Anything that does not speak about the finitude of Man is evading the issue. Which is to say anything with no vision of transcendence to reach beyond the what-we-see-is-what-we-get is finally hopeless. Nothing is truly "dignified" if death is its fate and everything along life's path a foreshadowing of it. This is not a conclusion of my words today. I could end this piece with a totally different final paragraph (in fact would like to invite you to try that). I could have said politicians have to be liars because we ask them to be: we want them to speak when nothing they say however energetically could drown the deafening silence of our cosmic estrangement.
I could have said many other things. But why? That's how most of us feel. Not that people don't care about the 215--and more past present and future, but every action we think we can take speak only more deeply about our helplessness.
Yours, Alex
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