My best friend is the voice for the Mastercard commercials.

Ferlinghetti.

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 22:13:16 GMT

I wrote a post in here a good couple of weeks ago about a young girl who had gotten raped a couple of streets away from my apartment in New York. She was not an anomaly, and according to the statistics, there have been many many more since that night that she was attacked and savagely beaten. I didn't unfilter the post because most of it felt preachy and I'm not in much of a position to be making judgment calls on life or the universe or anything in it, honestly. I didn't unfilter it because it was painfully true and for the first time I felt like I had something valid to say, which for whatever reason made me filter it. There was a follow-up article this morning, which I don't often see, something to let those who had seen the one before it, seen the article about the 13-year-old girl and her pink handbag and wondered how she was and if she would come out alright, something to let us know that she's doing better, that she pulled through fine, that in time the scars on her face and body won't be as noticeable. But as cliché as it sounds, there's emotional damage that doesn't heal the same way a lot of things do.

Here is the original post. It's long, so be warned before you click the cut.

She, like most women like her, was inauspicious. Dressed normally, not calling attention to herself. Young, pretty but not unusually so. She was and is average. Medium build, medium height, hair neither here nor there, brown eyes as is dominant. She had a pink leather bag in her hands, brand-new. Ruined now, of course. It wasn't big enough to hold much of anything, let alone mace or something to protect herself with. The newspaper a couple of days later read that it was an unprovoked attack. Rape isn't about sex, they say, just about power. Maybe that's meant to reassure. He took her face and pushed it so hard against the brick façade of the building he'd chosen for his act of power display that she probably won't ever get rid of the scars. He wanted her to fight back and she did, kicking and clawing and screaming, but he had sheer weight and strength over her. She was fortunate, if that's a word that can even be applied to this situation, to make it out with her life, but not with her virginity, not with her face, not even her pretty pink handbag.

They say that in the event of a rape, you should scream "fire" and not "rape". More people will respond to a fire because more people think a rape could potentially have a gun. And if that doesn't say a lot, I don't know what does.

This story was buried in the back of the newspaper earlier last week and it's taken a week for it to marinate and even for me to form any sort of thoughts about it, and now all I feel is sick. According to RAINN, every two and a half minutes, somewhere in America, someone is sexually assaulted. And there's a fear there, as a woman, there's a fear of being raped, it's a horrible fear, the idea that someone could so utterly and totally violate you not even for the sex but just for the power display and might as well bash your head against the bricks and leave you for death and hoping someone finds you before you bleed to death. And that's a genuine fear, the idea of that is destructive and I won't even try to articulate what it must be like to actually have it happen, and I applaud all the men-- and women-- who have found it in them to be touched again and touch again and trust the delicacy of human physicality.

I feel sad, utterly sad and broken-hearted that we as humans are inherently violent, inherently self-destructive, that we give way to bestial desires and when we could be inside with people who love us reading poetry we are in the world destroying beauty. We're making it bleed and then tossing around responsibility to whoever will hold it, but it burns our hands and we have to keep tossing it onward. We lie and betray and twist facts around to make ourselves not look like the monsters we are all capable of being and this, maybe, this is the seed that has me losing faith in everything that surrounds me, and where I once found beauty, in the bigger things, I now only find it in the details, a cup of coffee in the morning, arms around me when I wake up and feel my heart's exploding, and when the tears come and I'm left beside the bathtub feeling weak and like a used tissue, I know that I have love in this world and that's a mighty, beautiful thing.

I feel too much and I empathize with things I'll never understand and my heart breaks to see people lie and be horrible and nasty to each other when those are the things that destroy the tiny things, the Christmas stockings that are left over after Christmas presents are unwrapped and the box of cookies you forgot you bought. And I'm so utterly far from perfect or even kind most of the time but there's a pitiful gracelessness to human beings and where once I saw butterflies I only see bats. I'm faithless; I have no trust in humanity or that it can turn itself around or that it will ever recognize that it has to. This is Catholic guilt, maybe. I bear the burden of shame. I have no luxury to be guilt-free.

There are real victims in the world. I belittle no one's pain but in the arrogance that is selfishness all I want to do is shake everyone and myself into waking up. How can I obsess so much over Kleinigkeiten, details, suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and not remember that every day is a chance, every sunrise a gift, every smile a drop of gold, and when "we have changed everything, we will drink congratulations with our tea".

Alice Walker said we must dream our way out of this. As humans, as living breathing thinking feeling beings, we've been given free will. Love. Dreams. And what we destroy maybe one day we will make up for in the beauty of our love for one another, because to be alive without love is not being alive at all.

And it's horrible I never remember this until I read about someone else's tragedy in the newspaper and cry like it happened to me. That is selfishness and conceit. And I wanted to go visit this thirteen-year-old girl who was raped only a few streets from my apartment, but they released no information on her. So I'll pray and rationalize that it's enough.

And this morning there was the tiniest of an article about her, a little breath of an article in The New York Times, and I went to church as though it'd help. On some level it helped relieve me of my guilt, the guilt of in the end being so very incapable of helping another human being. The questions come: if you're walking down a street and you hear someone call for help, how much will the diffusion of responsibility prevent you from helping another human being? There are a hundred ways to cry for another human being but sometimes there is only one way to help.

"13-year-old [name omitted], who was admitted to the hospital nearly thirty days ago, is resting comfortably at home, her guardians report." No mention of her pink handbag or pressing charges, but the article became a human interest piece, mentioning her love of Harry Potter and Ashlee Simpson, and in the midst of a dehumanizing experience she ceased to be a statistic and she became a person, and sometimes when there are too many numbers, I forget that every number has a name, a fingerprint, a mother and a father, a faith or a lack thereof, a favorite book or a favorite movie, a hair color and an eye color, and at one point in their lives they were children and they too put too many things into their mouths. And the optimist and the dreamer and the idealist in me wants to believe that there are days when we can clear aside numbers and discover names and histories and people.

If I had a thought in my head of how to do it, I'd change the world. But as it is I don't mind this one so much. How trivial to think, how odd to bring it down to so small a level, but that girl is a far far greater man than I am, Gunga Din, to have what we as women are told to value highly ripped from her fragile body, her face irrevocably changed, and to sit peacefully in her room a month later and read Harry Potter. For as long as I live, every time I see a pink handbag, I'll wonder if she ever got herself another one, or if this time around she went for key lime.

I want the strength to always remember that no matter how badly I think life has beaten me down, you can kill it back with kindness and the recognition that the world, for all its nastiness and brutality and banality, has so many gifts to give in so many ways, be they a kiss, a butterfly, a really good sandwich, a letter tucked into a jacket you haven't worn for years left by someone now long gone from life, or just a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 23:30:50 GMT

This is really important, if only to me.

When George Harrison died, I cried. I'll be honest about this. It's not as though I knew him or I'd ever meet him, but in a lot of ways he affected my life through his music. I didn't cry when Princess Diana died, but I understood why so many people were so amazingly moved by her death. The world is filled with instances of people mourning people they don't even know but feel as though they know. And when a hero dies, people mourn.

I debated writing this post. I'm almost two weeks late on doing this, but I had to give things some time to marinate. I had to think about things and overhear my father on the phone making a phonecall in Polish, and my mother saying she wanted to go back to Kielce, to Warsaw, to mourn with the land we came from in the spirit with which she wants to mourn. But here it is, a dedication to a man who was loved, regardless of his religion, sometimes in spite of his religion.

And even Bono lent him his sunglasses.

He was in a great many ways the hero of Poland. America has its heroes, whoever they may be, athletes or astronauts, politicians or activists, musicians or artists, and Poland had Karol Wojtyla. As a boy, he was an actor, a writer, the son of an uncomissioned soldier; his mother died when he was young, and his brother followed soon after. And when he was in his late teens, his father died as well, and in the face of tremendous odds, and this is a case where I feel I can talk about the odd as actually being tremendous, he found faith and managed to lead a country back to its faith and a world to its faith too.

His apartment can be found in Wadowice, Poland at 7 Church Street. It is a tiny place but open to tourists to see his baby shoes and childhood pictures, notebooks he once might have written in, scribbling plays and contemplating his assertion that Polish drama puts Shakespeare in the shade. It’s hard to forget while cramped inside the tiny space, ushered through because there are a thousand more visitors that day that need to be jammed through like a meat grinder, that Auschwitz is not really that far away.

In 1939, Germany invaded Poland, and Hans Frank, the governor of occupied Poland, said that “every vestige of Polish culture is to be eliminated.” And after rationing Poles down to 900 calories a day, barely enough to survive—not enough to survive in most cases, he said, “There will never again be a Poland.” Wojtyla, due to the Nazi occupation, had no money; the military money he might have received after his father’s death was stopped, and Wojtyla went to work in a quarry, wearing wooden clog shoes and walking an hour to work each day. During those years, he saw firsthand millions of Poles being butchered, including ninety percent of Poland’s Jewish population. And he risked death nightly to study religion and his faith, and in 1942, he entered the priesthood illegally.

There is a slightly apocryphal story that goes that after the Warsaw uprising in August of 1944, the Nazis rounded up all men between fifteen and fifty in Krakow to bring them to labor camps. Wojtyla, they say, was in his basement praying, and the Nazis didn’t search his basement. He spent the remaining years of the war hiding from the Germans, studying.

In 1978, Karol Wojtyla, then known as John Paul II, became Pope. He was a small-town Polish boy, and to Poland it represented a world of hope for breaking free of communism. To the Soviets it represented the same thing, but the emotions surrounding it were vastly different. Within a few months, he returned to Poland for a nine-day trip and challenged the totalitarian system, demanded freedom for the church, and called for an expansion of worker’s rights. Later he said he only “shook the tree” a little, but Solidarity leader Lech Waleska said that it was the Holy Father who brought Poland out of its state of fear and oppression.

My father, as I have mentioned before, was the leader of part of the Solidarity movement in Poland. He had nearly 600,000 workers underneath him, and I have never heard him speak of anyone quite the way he speaks of Karol Wojtyla. Solidarity was a trade union born during a strike at the Gdansk shipyards, and within a few months it had ten million members and was a viable political force in Poland, all because someone had the audacity to “shake the tree”.

There is another apocryphal story that says that the Pope threatened to stand in front of Red Army tanks in Warsaw if they invaded. This is the man who went to prison and forgave Mehmet Ali Agca, who shot him in St. Peter’s Square in 1981. This is the man who sat with him in a jail cell and forgave him for nearly killing him. This is the man who exonerated Galileo Galilei and said that the Catholic Church had to apologize for the Inquisition, because religion by force is not what the Church wants to represent.

But in so many ways, the heroism of Karol Wojtyla has so little to do with Catholicism. He spoke out against the Soviets, hastening the collapse of the Soviet Union. He had a sly, self-deprecating humor, and in an early address, he said, “If I make a mistake, correct me.” And he has come under fire for so many different things, for his strict fundamental views of Catholicism, for the number of sexual abuse problems inside the Catholic Church, for so very many things.

“Thank you, O Lord, for making us Polish,” he said one day to thousands of Poles who gathered to see him with hope and passion for the future. He visited Poland so many times and he always said, “Don’t be scared. Don’t be scared.” He met secretly and publicly with Walesa, the Solidarity leader, and other Solidarity leaders all over Poland after the Polish government imposed martial law in 1981. He strove for the religious freedom of Catholics in Poland, and under his reign as Pope, the number of Roman Catholics in the world reached one billion.

“The Pope is the incarnation of all things Polish,” a Warsaw-based journalist named Adam Szostkiewicz said several years ago. And I think he was right, if we are lucky.

It’s strange, how people might not even know us but change our lives so desperately, so hugely, so irrevocably. On the 8th of April, 2005, when the Pope’s funeral services were held outside of the Vatican, Poland invaded Italy.

And there were people waving Solidarity flags, and for as long as Poland is a free democracy, we'll always remember how Karol Wojtyla, a farm boy, a poet, a writer from Wadowice, Poland, "shook the tree".

And even if you read none of this, this is worth looking at.