Tangents from Silence

Perhaps it's a function of having turned 40, but I really appreciate quiet moments these days.  As I (hand-)write these words at a nearby cafe, for the moment I wrinkle my nose at the non-stop sonic disturbance piping out of the PA system.  Not only does this cafe play music, but they also have TV monitors with the dialogue-crawl streaming their visual noise at the clientele.  Tonight, in the coffee-bar area they have on a baseball game, but in the lounge proper, it's a dreadful-looking reality program, evidently some sort of postmodern-gamey riff on Paris and the Golden Apple.  (Paris as a blond girl with three Gods vying for her apples, as it were.)
 
It's not that I despise music per se.  Sometimes I'm in the mood for it, but I do live in jangly Manhattan where silence feels comparatively rare.  Even in my apartment, which sits behind the Nuyorican Poets' Cafe.  Lots of nights there's a raucous crowd noisily hooting and hollering, not to mention the rather tony building next door to it with its barbecues and dinner parties in the courtyard below and the rooftop above, I'm sure.  I'm sure that, were I to be living in a less hectic place, be it rural, suburban or just less urban, I would complain that there was not enough distraction around to keep the internal noise from drowning my focus on the now. 
 
I'm frequently guilty for wanting what I don't have and not wanting what I do.
 
So.  When I think about it from that perspective, I can remember a new tool I have at my disposal.  It's not really new, it's just one I have to prod myself or be prodded to employ.  Just waking up to the beauty of the current moment.  At the moment I wrote these words (not to be confused with the joyous moments of typing them), I also remember that within the sounds I'm hearing there is silence.  Without the silence I wouldn't be able to hear the sound, much like it's all the other colors in the spectrum that allow me to see red.  Were red present, then I'm either seeing a monochrome or another color entirely.  As to sound, there's a 1011010010 binary sort of vibration going to create sonic "language."
 
Even here I can remember a sonic silence or envision a cone of silence surrounding me if that will help.  Just because there's sonic interference doesn't mean I have to acquiesce to unfocused haplessness.  All of a sudden I feel a sadness and a compassion for, of all things, the Iraqis experiencing American occupation.  Even though I don't personally wish to own what we are doing there, I have to acknowledge my complicity and own that I have some tiny impact in all this ugliness.
 
We-the-Americans are dominating these people in their own country due to our own petro-addiction.  We are behaving like any old drug-addled kingpin who muscles in on the territories where his product can best be grown.  We convince ourselves of some noble motive in it all, or rather we spin some noble motive to disguise what everyone else knows about our behaviors, but to which we pathetically have not collectively awakened.  As we lock up the cab-drivers, the farmers, the clerks, as we shoot the doctors and lawyers and journalists, we desperately dance around looking at our thuggish, junky behavior and instead spill our contempt on these unfortunately weaker stooges who have the temerity to have what we feel we are entitled to.  So of course we must rescue them from themselves for Xtianity, etc. 
 
We convince ourselves of our own humanity as we sodomize children and rape mothers and daughters.  It's their fault we're so awful to them.  As our addict-logic speaketh:  they need us, you see, because we are so much better than they are, and even though they deserve our contempt, we are here to set things right and share our glorious-Jesus-ness with them.  And while we're here, let's help ourselves to their resources, because of course it's only fitting.  (Wipe nose, excuse self, go to bathroom, snort/puke/get our fix however, return as if nothing ever happened.) 
 
We are still in finger-pointing drunken mode, blatantly and extravagantly ignoring those three digits pointing us-ward in favor of that externally wagging index finger.  Some factions in the country are working to cut us off from our addiction.  They've achieved some success, and probably will win that war of wills if only because it's not our land.  Not that's stopped us from trying before, or as I can see thus far, into the future.  I feel still that enough people have understood that we are collectively "at-bottom" but we still haven't moved toward the acknowledgement that we need help.  As I see the compassion for the victims, I start to become aware of compassion for the victimizers as well.  I forget who it was who said that our civilization is as much a prison for the CEO as for the convict.  The CEO may get to wear a more resplendent prison-uni and sleep in nicer cellblocks, but they are as much imprisoned as anyone in Sing Sing.  From this perspective, the Iraq war was inevitable.  And other wars may also be fought in the future, in Iran, some of the -stans of Asia, Venezuela, Africa and (gulp!) perhaps Russia and China too.  Unsober, but there we are.
 
Writing these words I feel a bit brave and a bit ridiculous.  A bit afraid, not so much of the consequences as much as that I'm letting others see into my soul.  It was fun to write the contemptuous "Amerilemic" (American/bulemic zusammengefuckt) , but I feel I'm allowing anyone who reads these words to see what my thinking/feeling processes are.  And this is somewhat scary because in 'Merka, this letting others see how I think and feel is perceived as femme, and we don't want that now, do we? 
 
Yet the victimizers I feel compassion for are primarily white, het men, and anyone can see they are in desperate need of lovingkindness and a firm, but gentle hand offering structure.  Focused attention.  I recognize that fellows carry their prinsons with them, but they've gone ahead and decorated their cells without acknowledging the nature of their shackles.  They've put up their posters of sportscars and nymphets, they've plastered their fantasies all over their circumscribed realities and proceed bravely and recklessly forward.  I can empathize with the attempts at denying realities blind-sides that constantly loop backwards toward them like boomerangs each time they fling the dad-blasted varmints away from them.  And they bring friends with them too!  Sheesh! 
 
I can empathize because I recognize my own struggle with food in the same terms.  Reality kept trying to get my attention--the constant depression, the sugar-related headaches, the rickety bones underneath all that excess weight, the invisibility around the guys I wanted, the constant blather that I-am-an-unworthy-loser due to all that fat.  And yet there was that part of me that felt I was drop-dead gorgeous and why didn't anyone see it?  It wasn't until I had that really deep, dark binge in December 2002 when I imagined myself dead and at my own funeral with people filing by and saying "Oh, Richard, what a waste.  I hope your suffering has ended anyway" when I finally acknowledged I needed help and that there was no shame in asking for the help I needed. 
 
As I awakened to the true costs of my affliction, I got such a gift of clarity and the even more potent gift of surrender.  And now I've awakened to even more costs that I find unacceptable.   
And I am bit in shock as to the scope of this statement.  I can't force even one other person to recover from their various and sundry addictions, much less a nation in power-drunk freefall.  It's part of my own addictive nature to say "See, I'm right and you just have to get with the program."  But paradoxically, that would not be "working my own program."  Like others I have to turn that index finger back toward myself and merely witness the misery the nation puts itself through and keep a detached perspective and a readiness to act.  Perhaps other Americans (and British and French and Brazilians and others) will join me in starting a "Civilization Anonymous" sort of 12-Step-based fellowship where we all address the socialization wounds that created that hole inside us in the first place.  Something like that where anyone can come in and through the gift of anonymity, gently expose their shadows for positive transformation.  Only by my own experience of pointing all the fingers at myself and not so much finding "answers" as intuitions and insights into the current moment can I really be of service to others, and through the dialogue between the internal and the external.  Because I do find my soul in relationship to others, and I know that the addict way is not for me. 
 
All that happens is that I end up alone, which makes it hard to cuddle and be cuddled.