The soul of the ancient machine

Andrea and I live right now in the Binnenstad in Utrecht. Not our permanent location, just where we happen to have found temporary housing while waiting for our long-term housing to become available. So we venture out from time to time into this beautiful, alien landscape.

Like most urban landscapes, there are lots of people, in varying states of wellness and happiness. Really quite a few happy people. Plenty of old people who are not as well as they once were, but are well taken care of. It's a pretty affluent part of town, so no surprise there.

A few days ago Andrea and I wandered down to get food, and on the way I passed a tall, blonde woman, perhaps in her thirties, who was moving very awkwardly and seemed to be in a lot of pain, but what she was trying to do was just be normal and use her body as we all do, only it was obviously hard for her. She was with a man, who seemed to care for her, so there was nothing for me to do for her. But I so wanted to. I don't know how she came to be in this condition. She seemed to have been broken. And there are a lot of Ukrainian refugees here, so it crossed my mind that she might be one, but she could just as easily just have some painful disease.

There is so much brokenness in the world that we usually don't look very closely at it. What's the point, after all? I can't do anything to help this woman. I just really really want to. I want her to not be in pain. I want her to move gracefully once again, as I imagine she once did, before someone or something broke her body. I want her to be like all the other people her age I see on the street. With problems, perhaps, but with a body that works. And who knows, maybe she was on the way to healing, and this effort she was doing in the street was part of that, so maybe my wish will come true. For her.

But I can't help but think of all the people whose bodies are being broken and ruined, who will never be well again, and who need not have suffered in this way. In Ukraine. In Gaza. In Syria. In Myanmar. In Rwanda. In India. In the United States.

Even there, I feel powerless. As an American, I have watched my home, over the course of my life, turn into a machine for breaking people. I say that as if it was better when I was a kid, and in some ways it was, but realistically it's been a machine for breaking people for a long time. Really, since before it was a nation at all, if you think of all the Native Americans who were broken by the settlers.

There's always been a struggle, with this machine, between trying to do good and trying to do evil. Trying to heal people, and trying to curse them. There is a storied history of advancing the cause of freedom, of course, and that feels very real and important to me. Tears come to my eyes and the hair rises on my skin when I read the Declaration of Independence. I believe, on a deep gut level, in the goodness and rightness of that flawed and beautiful place where I was born.

We talk about people taking power, or taking up the reins of power, and what they do with it, quite a bit. How to pick the right person to take up the reins of power. How to avoid someone bad getting access to that power. But I want to talk a little bit about the thing that they are getting access to, or the reins to.

This thing is us. It's our power.

But the problem with this narrative is that it motivates a struggle to take the power back. I don't think that's a bad struggle to engage in. Certainly if you are part of a huge machine that has the capacity to do great good and great evil, you would want the person in charge of it to use it wisely.

But I think we need to realize too that we are that machine's parts. That machine is not some separate entity, out there somewhere, wandering the veldt like a great wildebeest or elephant or tiger, waiting to be harnessed for good or ill. It is us, as a whole, acting often together and often at crossed purposes.

And so while we think about who should be in charge of this machine, and while that is a good thing, we should talk about the nature of the machine itself, and whether we can transform it into something that is not good at crushing people. That, if a traumatized, broken, aging, angry person were somehow to gain control of it, would not help the trauma within that person to propagate itself.

Instead it would take that traumatized person and heal them. Unbreak them, if possible, or if not, hold them, let them feel, perhaps for the first time in their life, safe and loved.

I put it to you that this is a thing that is possible. This can be done. It requires us to take a very different attitude about how to heal the world. But it can be done. And we should do it.