The World Depends on This

Excerpt from Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2004), 77.  Copyright © 2004, Kathleen Dean Moore

            The message machine was blinking when I got home from work: “First, I want you to know that your daughter is going to be fine.”  I braced myself for whatever would come next.  “She was arrested during the anti-war demonstrations.  They’re holding her in the San Francisco County Jail.”

            Frank and I had been watching world news all day. Now suddenly, this wasn’t about world news. It was about our daughter and a parent’s fears. What will she eat?  How can she sleep?  Do the handcuffs cut her wrists? 

            The night before, I had been dreaming about Erin.  She was one of the young people in an outdoor clothing catalogue, striding out in autumn colors, her hair as bright as apricots.  Wearing a skirt the color of pumpkins, she had leaned against the other young people, laughing.  But she wasn’t in some dreamy, sun-saturated place now; she was sitting in a small cube of light in a darkened jail.

            I tried to picture a jail at night. Do the other inmates sleep splay-legged and heavy on their backs?  Do they curl up as if they were babies?  And our daughter?--surely she’s sitting awake on a bench with her knees to her chest and her arms wrapped around them.  She will be cold, in that dark place.

            Babies startle if they are not wrapped tightly. We learned this in a child-care class before she was born.  Their bodies twitch and their arms flail as they sleep, and if nothing is holding them, they are afraid.  So you have to wrap a newborn baby.  We held our daughter close and wrapped her in blankets, tight as corn in the husk.

            We loved her so much and raised her so carefully, and isn’t this what all parents do if they can?  Piano lessons, art lessons, a hundred-dollar safety seat for the car. When she learned to drive, we tried to keep track of where she went and when she would be home.  It never occurred to us that she would go to jail.

            So here is the first thing she said when she called collect from the holding cell: “What can I say to keep you from worrying?” 

            To keep a parent from worrying?

            Tell us you’re home in bed, I cried, but Frank took the phone from my hand.  She told him she was in a holding cell with dozens of other women. They are strong, amazing women, many of them mothers and grandmothers, many elegantly dressed in black, she said, and Frank thought that Erin’s own voice was strong and amazing, more certain than he had ever heard.

            To pass the time, the women are teaching each other to dance, she said. They are placing calls to news agencies, but they can’t get through.  Bombs are falling, newspapers aren’t answering their phones, injustice and environmental destruction tangle in nets of violence and profit around the world--and all these beautiful women are in jail.

            The police released Erin at 2:30 a.m. A friend came into the city to drive her home.

            Don’t all parents want the world for their children?  Fellow parents, tell me, wouldn’t we do anything for them? To give them big houses, we will cut ancient forests. To give them perfect fruit, we will poison their food with pesticides.  To give them the latest technologies, we will reduce entire valleys to toxic dumps. To give them the best education, we will invest in companies that profit from death. To keep them safe, we will deny them the right to privacy, to travel unimpeded, to peacefully assemble.  And to give them peace, we will kill other peoples’ children or send them to be killed, and amass enough weapons to kill the children again, kill them twenty times if necessary. 

            We would do anything for our children but the one big thing: Stop and ask ourselves, what are we doing and allowing to be done? I looked again at the shopping list where Frank scribbled notes as he talked on the phone: Toilet paper / Bourbon / Flowers / County Jail / War protest / Inmate / Dave 415-516-6372. How everyday and ordinary are our disastrous decisions. Frank and I go busily about, buying this or that, voting or not, burning up gasoline or jet fuel or split pine--on a small scale, in the short term, making things work for our children--forgetting that whatever is left of the world is the place where they will have to live.

            What will our grandchildren say?  I think I can guess:

            How could you not have known?  What more evidence did you need that your lives, your comfortable lives, would do so much damage to ours?

            Did you think you could wage war against nations without waging war against people and against the earth?  Didn’t you wonder what we would drink, once you had poisoned the aquifers? Didn’t you wonder what we would breathe, once you poisoned the air? Did you stop to ask how we would be safe, in a world poisoned by war?

            Did you think it all belonged to you—this beautiful earth?

            You, who loved your children, did you think we could live without clean air and healthy cities? You, who loved the earth, did you think we could live without birdsong and swaying trees?

            And if you knew, how could you not care? What could matter more to you than your children, and their babies?  How could a parent destroy what is life-giving and astonishing in her child’s world?

            And if you knew, and you cared, how could you not act?  What excuses did you make?

            And now, what would you have us do?

            Two days after she got out of jail, we walked with Erin beside the ocean. Under a steep headland, we came across a jumbled heap of fishing nets, string, nylon cord and bullwhip kelp, intricately tangled.  Buoys were smashed and buried beyond hope. 

            “This is what the world is,” she said. She tugged at a rope in the nets gone to tangled ruin, drifted with sand.

            “Yes.  But you don’t have to go to jail to say so.  There are other ways,” I said softly, knowing I should be still.

            She answered as softly. “Then you need to show me those ways,” she said.  “Don’t tell me. Show me.”

            Dear god.  I don’t know what to do: what to hope and what to fear, what to invest in and what to give up, what to insist on and what to refuse, how to go on with living in a time of death. All I know is how to hold my daughter, wrapping my arms tight around her shoulders.  Right now, the world depends on this.