Ponderings

When your teenager is scheduled for a sleep-deprived study, a warning should be issued to the parents. The entire household will be sleep deprived. The experience is a not-so-cheery trip down memory lane to those new baby wake up calls. All of the slogginess and none of the sweet baby smell.

Which is all to say that, when my daughter was scheduled for a “sleep deprived” study yesterday, I should have known I was going to have a bad day. The problem, of course, is that the primary symptom of sleep deprivation is obliviousness. So rather than a helpful warning beep, my first clue was being locked out of my house at 8:30am. I lost the show down between my husbands’s, “we always lock the back door” and my, “we never lock the backdoor”. The last one out the door wins, and I wasn’t. (Given that he had to drive home from work to let us in, we’ll call that one a draw.) Twelve hours later, I was searching for my office keys to no avail. My son, who had borrowed them, was furious with me in a bizarre twist of adolescent illogic. How can the one who did the losing blame the one who is now experiencing the loss? In between the key challenges was a debate with the contractor at my house, a chastising conversation with a friend, and the normal pile of work and taxi-mom chores.

All of this is ample explanation of why Americans seem oblivious. It’s not that we don’t know that things are awry, we just don’t have enough focused energy to offer a reasonable response. We recognize that trillion dollar debt is problematic, that wars of aggression are mean spirited (read: wrong), that both polar bears and homeless men deserve safe haven, and that big brother eavesdropping on this conversation is unnerving. We are fully aware but not fully functional.

Mass media is bane and blessing in this regard. We are so much more aware of the warts and simultaneously overwhelmed by the magnitude. I confess that the unprocessed sound-bytes of war and conflict duel in my dreams, only contributing to the cycle of sleep deprivation. As we mark another 9/11 anniversary, now our sixth, the messages are ever more complex and confusing. Osama bin Laden is back in the news (wasn’t he at least one war ago?) and infringements on our freedom (in the name of freedom!) continue to expand. Explanations are fine as far as they go, but explanations are not excuses and the gravity of our current path warrants focused response.

Last night I went to bed promptly at 9pm and didn’t stir until my son was singing at 7am. Today I’m ready to tackle the world. As I’m typing these words comes a CNN News Break and my resolve to read and respond. “One officer dead, three wounded in Miami shoot-out.” One mother grieving, three in mortal fear. No amount of REM’s prepare one to respond to that kind of senseless slaughter. Senseless shedding of human blood is, of course, the same moral ellipse that fuels the endless warring in Iraq.

But today is drawing to a close. Let’s pray that Scarlett is right about tomorrow.