Wrath

There was a time when this blog was full of largely irrelevant, mundane posts relating to my day-to-day life.  This past year has been hell.  A lot of who I am has been burned away in trials by fire.  I'm still here.  I'm still breathing.  I'm just not who I used to be.  And I don't know who I will become.  This blog has fallen a little quiet during that time because I don't like to share bleakness.  I wish to be a positive force for change in this world.  Now that the tide is turning, now that I am deciding who I am I'm feeling the urge to write again but I don't think this blog, like me, will ever be what it once was.  I don't yet know whether that will be something people like or not but whether what I share has people's approval or not can't be the focus of my thoughts when I write.

The good thing about burning away so much of yourself and not knowing what's left is that at a certain point you come to see that the choice is yours.  The last few months I've worn some pretty disgusting behaviour.  I've taken it on the chin from a number of sources and I've taken it for a number of different reasons.  Partially because I felt like I deserved it.  Partially because I couldn't believe it was happening and I didn't know what to do about it, and finally because I tend to believe people try to do the best with what they've got and I couldn't bring myself to believe that the people perpetrating the behaviour were anything other than ignorant to its impact and effects.  Yesterday as I went through some of the more recent events my friend Luke called me an incredibly forgiving person in a way that implied that my tolerance and forgiveness exceeds the norm.  That brought me up short.  He wasn't the first person to say it.  I get a lot of people telling me I tolerate far worse than I should and I had to think about it.

A big part of it is that while I might be angry and upset, I don't think it's my job to judge other people.  I generally think the lives people lead are their own punishment or reward for being the sort of person that they are.  While I don't mind discussing my own life, I don't often like to talk about other people's private lives on my blog so instead of using recent examples from my own experience, I want to use two fairly public incidents that people are probably familiar with to demonstrate what I mean.

In March 1993 a photographer by the name of Kevin Carter took an iconic photo of a starving toddler trying to reach a feeding centre in the Sudan.  In the background a vulture stood watch, clearly waiting for the child's death.  This picture, to me, is horrific.  And to the world that saw it, it wasn't just the photo but the actions of the photographer - who apparently took the photo and left the child to whatever fate she met - that was horrific.  It's easy when you say it like that to immediately judge the man.  How could you?  I'll bet a million people or more saw that photo, heard the back story and thought that.  How could you do that?  But how many people were actually there?  How many had seen the countless helpless souls suffering during that famine?  How many lifted a finger to help?  How many stopped to wonder how a human being gets to a point where they could be in place to take a photo like that and not feel moved to help the child?  Can you imagine what horrors you'd have to see before you reached a point where you could take that photo and then just walk away?

Maybe you think nothing would ever scrub the humanity out of you - that you personally would never reach such a point in your existence where you would see something like that and not be moved to do all that you could to help.  How lucky we are that we're not in the Sudan trying to document a famine and wake the world up to the sheer magnitude of horror that that entails.  I'll bet almost everyone that knows the story of Kevin Carter's iconic photo was horrified...but how many were relieved that they weren't the ones there to take it?  Do you feel better when you know that ultimately Kevin Carter took his own life, leaving behind a suicide note that read in part, "I am haunted by the vivid memories of killings and corpses and anger and pain ... of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners..."  Was the taking of his own life enough to appease you?

Closer to home and more recently we have the case of Jacintha Saldanha, the nurse who took her own life after she was subjected to a prank phone call by 2DayFM DJs Michael Christian and Mel Greig.  Personally I'm not a fan of prank phone call humour because it always comes at the expense of someone, somewhere.  For that reason I choose to not listen to radio stations that do this sort of thing.  This time there was a tragic outcome that no one predicted for what should have been a harmless little prank.  Now the public are baying for the blood of the perpetrators.  It makes me wonder. Would it be better if these DJs killed themselves in turn?  Would that appease people?  It wouldn't bring Jacintha back.  It wouldn't make her family any less aggrieved.  It literally wouldn't fix anything.  And yet the harassment and abuse is hurled, pushing these people ever closer to the edge themselves.  The difference is that this time you can see it happening and still no one is doing anything about it.

Now we come to my point.  People always ask me why I don't get angry at things like this.  Come call for their blood, boycott their sponsors, write an angry letter - don't you care?  I do care.  I care more than you can imagine.  But the damage has already been done.  Nothing anyone said about Kevin Carter the photographer would ever cut as deeply into his soul as the experiences that made him into the man who took that photograph.  Nothing anyone ever says will remove the guilt and shame from those DJs who will always wonder how much they contributed to the desperation of a suicidal nurse who went over the edge.  They'll live with that for the rest of their lives - it will eat at them, claw at them, whisper to them in the quiet moments and nothing I could ever say or do would have remotely as much impact as what will happen organically.

Anger begets anger.  Violence begets violence.  We, all of us, get to choose who we are and how we handle  the situations and circumstances that face us each day.  And we all must live with the fallout of our actions.  Speaking in moments of anger, even when you think your rage is justified, is a dangerous, dangerous thing to be doing.  Because even if you get the chance to apologise, you can't call those words back and you won't ever be able to remove the memory of them from your target.  Sometimes words have fatal consequences.  On both relationships and people themselves.