Taking a knee for an injured world
- Melissa Herrera: Not Waiting for Friday
- May 4, 2020
- 1438
I find the center of myself, most often, just before dawn creeps over the edge of my window. The kitchen is dark, night shadows still hugging the corners of the room, and my toes feel cold. The cracked leather of the chair embraces me, and the silence of this holy space feels otherworldly. My worn table is solid as the steamy vapor from the cup penetrates my face, and as the warmth spreads through my chest, I find the center of myself in the stillness.
I can be still for hours, days. I was born to stay home and putter around until the light on the edge of the carpet signals supper time is approaching. A day rearranging my bookshelf into sections that only I understand is a good day.
I have ready many books on WWII, not so much on combat, and have always been drawn to the stories of Jewish people hiding in attics, inside walls and darkened closets. I pored over tomes that shed light on Anne Frank and the way her and her family sacrificed and resisted the forces of evil that sought to capture them. She ultimately succumbed to typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. After all that effort it was a bacteria that killed her.
I felt a kinship with her because she kept an extensive journal, whiling away the hours with a pen and words and phrases, an outpouring of her emotion during this forced time of silence and hiding, opening up a well of reflection. Not to hide would have meant certain death for them because the Nazis were hell-bent on destroying them because of who they were, merely for existing.
I could never quite get over the fact that they so carefully hid for two years in a cramped space and still ended up in concentration camps, dying of disease, with only their father surviving. They did what they had to for themselves and for others, as you do when facing an enemy that threatens your survival.
I read a comment last week, amongst the tirade of vitriol aimed at our governor as he unfolded the plan for reopening Ohio: “It’s barely been a month, and our economy is terrible. We will be paying for that for a while, and just to help a sliver of Americans stay healthy? We can’t do that forever.”
The phrase “a sliver of Americans” sent an ominous chill through me, and every story of small pockets of people who fled or escaped or perished during a cataclysmic event flooded my mind. I have pondered that comment and turned it around in my head every morning since in the unearthly silence of my kitchen. Every single death is a heartache, from those lost to disease, to the shores of Libya, in a skyscraper in New York City, on foot as they fled their own country becoming a refugee with each footfall or in the silence of their room when the noise in their head can’t be turned off.
Even now as thousands and thousands and thousands of us have died in a brief time frame, we cannot seem to sit still inside it. We cannot take it in, something so disruptive to our blissfully uninterrupted lives. With the rush to restore normalcy, there is no time to sit and reflect on what is happening around us, to silence ourselves inside that vacuum and feel the pain of it. We have been disrupted, impacted and made to feel uncomfortable, and we dishonor the incredible heartbreak of it by believing a sliver of us are not worth the effort.
Anne Frank went into hiding for two years, sitting in silence to try and save her life and the life of her family. Imagine telling her what she had done was silly and that her life was dispensable because we didn’t have time to help keep her hidden.
America is not in hiding, and neither is the world. We’ve simply taken a knee for an injured teammate, and when they feel better, we can get back up again.