So what is it? What matters?

Your kid? The book you’re writing? Aunt Ruth’s inheritance (which is coming any day now that the nursing home called to say her liver is failing)? The meeting you’re having next week with the friend of a friend who has pledged to give you some free advice on how to start up your turquoise jewelry business on the web?

If you consciously arrange your priorities once and for (fucking) all, what are they? And what takes precedence over what? Your physical safety? The avoidance of pain? Food on the table? Your partner’s fidelity? Painting that sunflower outside your bedroom window when the morning light is just right?

Do our priorities arrange themselves according to what matters to us, or according to what doesn’t? Same thing? How do we assign meaning? Or does it assign itself?

I’m making a big mountain out of a molehill, don’t you think? I know exactly what determines meaning. Proximity. What’s closest to us matters, and what’s far away doesn’t.

Does it matter that millions are dying of starvation and slaughter in Africa? Of course not, they’re half a world away. Would it matter more if they were white? Probably yes, but they’d still be far away. The combination of far and black is absolutely lethal. We just don’t give a shit.

Does anybody on the cultural right care about the rights of gay people? Yes. But only those who have a gay family member. Proximity. Otherwise, we’re barely even people to them.

Fix health care? Why? I have health care.

 The bottom line message of Jesus Christ was Care about the other guy as much as you care about yourself, or, actually, Care more about him than you do about yourself. Which is always why I tend to laugh or choke when I hear America referred to as a Christian Nation. (The absurdity makes me laugh and the hypocrisy makes me choke.) The Golden Rule is a thinly disguised, secular re-write of Christ’s perfect message. (I say perfect even though I do not, personally, believe he was divine.) The message is divine though: Treat others as you’d like to be treated. 

But does that include anyone in Darfur? Or does it only refer to those in close proximity to me? Am I to forgo the $8 per-slice carrot cake with the heavenly cream-cheese icing because millions of kids go to bed hungry every night in this country and all over the world? I may as well eat it if I’m not sending them the money.

Please don’t think I’m raising these questions for you, but that I’ve given myself a free pass, I haven’t. I lay in bed most nights wondering how to live with my understanding of my own myopic view of the world. No that’s wrong. Actually I do see things clearly that are far away. So my own problem isn’t myopia at all, it’s an unwillingness to take action as regards what I see, unless the things are close to me. I do have a great deal of contempt, I admit, for those who cannot or will not see, but ultimately we exist in the same state: stasis.

Perhaps what I’m really arguing for is more self-loathing in America. Yeah, that’s it. I feel just as helpless to do anything about the state of this nation and this world as anyone else, but I also feel a good, strong whoosh of self-directed anger about it every day. Does that make me a superior being to those who cannot see farther than the end of their own noses? I truly wish it did. I must secretly envy them, (though now my secret’s out).

My life has become all about pain management. It’s Priority Number One. On any given day, my first concern is all about the stopping, the stilling, the postponing, the minimizing, the deflecting, the ignoring, the rejecting, and ultimately, the embracing of pain. And I am in a huge majority of people on this planet, an overwhelming majority. And I am actually lucky that my pain is in my body, where I have at least some choice about how to deal with it. I wouldn’t want my pain to be about how to feed my five kids, or how to keep them from getting gunned down by the gang that roams my street. I’m grateful for that.