A Small Shaking Room

Friday July 22, 2016

I've gotten around to reading Toffler. Strange that I ordered his three most famous books and two weeks later he slips his mortal tether. Future Shock is good - reading his predictions of the future without concepts of the Internet, HIV, 9/11 - a few years changes everything. Future Shock is slow going between the reading I have to do for school, the reading I have to do for work, and the other things besides reading I want to do, but it is nice to sit down and savor a little piece of a book at a time. Especially books with prose like Toffler's. Even someone with a sweet-tooth like me eats a rich piece of pastry with a small fork. I became curious and picked up The Third Wave and read the first page - and while his description of his 36 year old present day sounds like it could have been written about tomorrow morning, it wasn't the first page that really seized me - but the quote he included on one of the blank pages you find in the front of print books.

Did we come here to laugh or cry? Are we dying or being born?

A quote from Carlos Fuentes' novel Terra Nostra. Another book added to a quickly growing list. I thought about that quote again today at work. I answer most either / or philosophical musings these days with "yes." To Fuentes' question (if it is his and not a character's) I say "yes" twice. "Yes yes."

I wonder if I'm grasping at straws or if this is simply a thought process straining to understand itself, and if so, why does it not understand itself as well as it did yesterday?

Tragedy and mundanity are partners - like Abbott and Costello, or toast and butter - but closer, an undifferentiated dawn and dusk. And that's the main point I intended on making when I started writing.

You see, watching the news the last few days has been frustrating - the violence in Dallas and Nice particularly. People act like those are a special kind of violence, or like those were an extraordinary number of deaths, or like sitting behind a TV each person is somehow affected by these events. I should say not. The only reason it affects anyone not right there is because it's being piped into peoples' heads. But if not for the coverage, the news cycle, and a sizable addiction to other peoples' trauma, I would say most folks who feel affected by current events wouldn't feel a goddamn thing one way or the other - they sure don't when it happens further away (save that thought.)

But people aren't aware of suffering that passes within an arm's reach of them. From the vantage of my ambulance, I got to see that for myself today. I had a patient that was devastated - and young. A child that I wished death for. Think about that. And here we are, driving through Washington DC on a hot summer afternoon. A Saturday. And everyone is out in the street. And I looked out the back window and one frame froze and clung to me. People walking out directly behind us when we passed, grinning, doing their thing, while I'm sitting on a bench seat wishing that the child on the cot in front of me would die, but not right then because then I would be obligated to act.

Make no mistake, I provided excellent care, but it felt dirty. And it didn't help that I had come from PT, and my uniform felt sticky, and it was humid and disgusting in the back of the ambulance. But those grinning people pissed me off. They probably thought they felt something watching the news but were oblivious to suffering a pace away.

Pipe in the suffering from an intermediate distance (but not too far, because then people look and sound different, and that's not the same,) and people have their eyes open, they think and say, but drive it by them, and not one clue. And that's because they see the ambulance pass each day. They walk past a dozen homeless people on their way to work or school or shopping.

And as for the places where war and suffering are constant - what's so special about the suffering there? It happens every day.

Sebastian Junger nailed my experience of trauma when he described his own(though our experiences are vastly different.) I found my eyes watering suddenly at little things today too. But I'm not just crying -