“Better pass boldly into that other world, in the full glory of some passion, than fade and wither dismally with age”.. (James Joyce)
I’ve often been accused of being too passionate, of caring too much about certain things. But I believe that passion, also defined as fervor or zeal, is one of the essential core values of human life, along with the Apostle Paul’s Biblical list of the virtues of faith, hope and charity.
Passionate people have strong opinions and usually articulate them very well. We are also perfectionists, and we don’t handle incompetence in the public arena very well, all of which tend to preclude us from being the most popular person in the room. I long ago accepted the fact that I won’t have the largest funeral in Lebanon, nor will my obituary make the front page.
But not everyone seems to care that much about anything other than their own lives. T.S. Eliot once said, “It is obvious that we can no more explain passion to a person who has never experienced it than we can explain light to the blind”.
One of my Facebook friends was lamenting the fact that he has heard no public outcry against the massacre of the Yazidis in Iraq. People are being beheaded there. Beheaded!
Families are being buried alive. How can we not care? We see the images on the daily news, and yet in our public discourse, it is barely mentioned.
I would submit that our culture has become so desensitized by computer games and violent movies that the scenes playing out in our living rooms each day do not register in our already distracted minds that these are real people dying right before our eyes, and we don’t even flinch.
Did we miss the news report that the monster who murdered 20 little children at Sandy Hook school spent literally days watching these games and practicing his skill in hitting moving targets on the computer screen, causing the investigators to arrive at the conclusion that the more the small children tried to move to avoid the bullets he was firing at them, the more attempts he made to cause them to quit moving as they died in that horrific scene. This explains why so many of the little bodies were blasted by numerous wounds. It was just another game to his tortured mind.
Does distance also affect our passion? There is a great deal of outrage right now with regard to the violence in Ferguson, MO. But would there be this much interest if the events were taking place in Ferguson, Oregon?
I am very passionate in what I perceive as hypocrisy in politics, such as the discussion this week about why the Attorney General came to Ferguson while he has consistently ignored cities like Detroit and Chicago where gun violence has been rampant for several years now.
The spokesman for the administration flippantly answered “because the victim’s family asked for the president’s attention and assistance”. Excuse me. The mother of Marine Sgt. Andrew Tahmooressie has been begging the president for his “attention and assistance” in getting her son out of a Mexican prison where he has been unjustly held and beaten now since March 31.
Tahmooressie, a decorated Marine who served two tours of duty in Afghanistan and is still a member of the military, nevertheless remains imprisoned there today despite the support from the American public resulting in the White House receiving more than 120,000 signatures on a petition pleading for his release.
I hate to play the race card here but I can come to no other conclusion than that the color of one’s skin determines the amount of “attention and assistance” our president and this White House are willing to put forth. (Passionate people have a heightened sense of unfairness and injustice, it’s in our DNA.)
Another Ferguson related story which troubles me is the “suggestion” that just maybe the “feds” may need to take a second look at the practice of making military equipment available to local police departments.
I think this would be a major mistake especially when our security experts are saying that we are at a higher risk now from terrorists than we were before the attack on September 11.
I not only support our military, I support our law enforcement. Passionately. They are not always perfect, but they do a difficult job under difficult conditions, and I do not support taking away any of the tools they might need. I don’t pretend to know what happened in Ferguson with regard to alleged abuse of equipment and personnel, but I do know that our law enforcement officials need to protect themselves so they can protect us.
Just this week in Harvey IL, a SWAT team was called to rescue two women and six children who had been held hostage for 21 hours by two robbers who invaded the home and then got into a gunfight with police officers during the standoff. Two officers received gunshot wounds.
My son-in-law is a retired highway patrolman. My brother served as an MP in the Marines, as well as volunteer deputy sheriff for Laclede County. And my husband’s cousin was murdered while on duty as a Kansas City police officer by a young man who was unarmed until he got the officer’s gun away from him and shot him with it.
Certainly we hope we never have an active shooter or stabbing incident in one of our schools or places of business. But we live in a town where a railroad runs right through our business district, making us vulnerable in the event of a hazardous materials accident. Should the unthinkable ever happen, I want our law enforcement and emergency personnel here to have adequate vehicles and equipment to protect us.
Noted author Nicholas Sparks wrote: “The saddest people I’ve ever met in life are the ones who don’t care deeply about anything at all.”
So yes I am passionate, and probably not very popular after this column. So, what else is new?
© Joan Rowden Hart 2017
Comments