Too Much With Us

April 26, 2013
By Mickey Friedman

I took Peter’s advice and bought clear packing tape to patch the major cuts and bruises of my sign, then went back out to demonstrate this past weekend. Peter, as he often does, took a short break from his retail duties to join me.

Peter has been one of the best things about my weekly manifestation. Like others who have known war up close, it is always with him. He has known profound loss and his empathy and understanding, his spirituality, is so very hard earned. His impatience with bluster and rhetoric and hyper-inflated patriotism is also profound. It doesn’t take much of it to get him going.

Our Saturday visits are one part politics and one part sports. We both share a lifetime’s love of sports and our shared devotion to the New York Giants and New York Knicks enables us to bridge the great divide. For some odd reason I will never understand, Peter is a Yankee fan. Having grown up in the Bronx and having had to fight to defend my devotion to Jackie Robinson, the Duke, and the Brooklyn Dodgers, I know all too well the Evil Empire when I see it. And so it made perfect sense to transfer my allegiance to the Red Sox.

We often talk about the 1960s. Peter went to that war; I fought to end it. I spent a moment in Madison, Wisconsin; Peter spent years there. I still have vivid memories of People’s Park and the Food Co-op.

Peter knows food and grows food. Somewhere along the way I gave up. I’m pretty sure I still have a copy of the Tassajara Bread Book but godknowswhere it’s hiding. And my abandoned juicer gives me a dirty look every time I pass it on the way to the toaster oven.

Peter and I miss the energy and optimism of those days, our many hopes and dreams. The conscious decision, often fervent desire to find an alternative to money and the material. Often delusional but always determined to find other ways: peace not war, cooperation not conflict.

We were both so very sad and weary this past weekend; so very discouraged. Newtown, Boston, and the inability to pass a pathetic background check bill. More slaughter; more stupidity. Yet more evidence we are governed by those convinced their constituents no longer matter.

After months of avoiding the TV news I surrendered, hoping to learn more about Boston. But I was quickly disgusted. It has taken us so little time to lose so much. There was once journalism, an imperfect art always, but an honorable profession. Men and women practiced it, apprenticed to learn it, working their way up from the wire room, or their high school papers. Until we created college courses to study it, and journalism schools to graduate from. But it is always about the questions to ask, the questions to answer. To discover what is really happening: who is involved; how and why. A less than perfect pursuit of truth.

Now we have Wolf Blitzer front and center, puffed up, using ten words when he could use one, himself the continuing story. We have highly-paid expert experts peddling unending speculation about what they might have done when they were at Homeland Security or the FBI or the CIA, or better yet what they might do if they had another chance at it and always what someone else ought to do.

So much of it was profoundly embarrassing. The wrong suspects. The wrong information. It sometimes felt like a never-ending attempt to make things worse.

Seemingly lost in all this was the horrifying loss of first responders in West, Texas. Who sacrificed themselves confronting a massive fire and explosion in a fertilizer storage plant in a residential neighborhood. Lethal toxic chemicals stored beside a nursing home and school. Uninspected. And sadly we will spend less than one-thousandth of the energy asking how and why this could have happened than we will trying to discover the truth of Boston. Why did brave firefighters and police die in West, Texas? And couldn’t this all have been avoided?

Maybe we would be more vigilant if the owners of the factory had vacationed in Chechyna, or had an uncle in Dagestan? I have no interest in minimizing the very real threats of international terrorism. I only want to suggest there are many forms of terror. The people of West, Texas were innocent victims as worthy of our compassion and concern. The brothers in Boston suffered one form of madness; whoever was responsible for the explosion in West was mad in another way. Was it greed, incompetence, or just plain laziness? Will we find out? Will we care?

My friend Peter mourns the loss of innocent life. It saddens him in the deepest ways. As the poet Wordsworth wrote: “The world is too much with us.”