Mercy

Posted on July 25, 2003 in Book of Days

Note: This is part of a series based on exercises from A Writer’s Book of Days. It’s something of a rebellion against the Friday Five and similar tupperware content memes.

Today’s topic: Write about asking for mercy.

When you’re under the barrage of keyboards, it’s very hard to ask for mercy. I guess the way I need to go about writing this is as if I am writing this for someone else, someone who looks like me who has been through all the crap that I have gone through at the hands of people who have their own life troubles, who have used him or her for target practice.

The first thing I would say to this person is that I understand how he/she feels. It’s never easy when people who never drop by for a kind word suddenly pop up out of no where and show their meanness as a counterweight to your attempts at compassion for another human being. Your heart starts to thump hard, you feel a little faint, your sleep gets ruined. It may be that the same happens to them or they may be crazed sociopaths out to destroy something that they would prefer didn’t exist as a contrast to their own heartlessness — they may feel absolutely nothing or joy.

What you have to remember is that it is hard to be a human being, my friend. For everyone. I know you know this. I know that there seem to be plenty of people who don’t seem to get it, who seem to believe that the best thing for a person who has been hit hard is to bury them in more and more approbation. I honestly believe that often the people who are attacked the most sometimes are the ones who may deserve it the least. At least they are not the great tyrants of the world. They are often people who think hard on the sufferings of others. They worry about the pain they may be causing with their purchases, with their lifestyles. They speak their minds, brutally honest at times, but seldom, very seldom in the interest of pure selfishness.

It is truly twisted when you are attacked for taking a stand on behalf of human dignity, when people try to cast you as evil for defending a person or a class’s right to decency and respect. Your sickness is understandable, your despair comprehensible in the face of such flabbergasting contradictions. You are truly persecuted for righteousness’s sake.

To whom do you ask mercy when you are surrounded by unmerciful people, when it is plain that any higher intelligence in this universe is a whirlwind that tells you not to ask why things happen to you though you have striven to be just?

I don’t have an answer, my friend. It would be dishonest of me to tell you to trust in God because God, as any victim of a random shell can tell you, is untrustworthy. You can’t even be sure that God exists and you live in these hardest times in the fear that God does and has it in for you? How can you fight this God-bully, this Great White Whale who chews off legs and destroys whole ships?

You already know that it is hard to trust people. This whole existence appears rife with peril. You learned that lesson at an early age and the affirmations that this is true are abundant and overwhelming.

The only thing I can give you is Hope. You’re surrounded by human beings and they are all you have. There’s no certainty of an afterlife. Pain will come again, but so will joy. Live through the shit that people dish out for the mercy of those moments. Live to those moments, through everything that is bad. When your eye catches the sight of a flower blooming or a crested Phainopepla, rejoice. You lived to see it. You passed through the crap of human stupidity and cruelty to get to this moment. And there will be people who are kind, honest, and not out to punish you as if you were some overarching incarnation of evil. There will be people who will not have the answers and who will understand the anger. They will know how to bring you down to the land of the living. Live so that you might meet them, again and again.

They do exist. You’ve met them.

Now that this is out, slough the rotting skin. Be yourself, purely, and without resort to philosophizing like I have here. See the world. Live in it. Love it as best you can. Look for the crickets in the field and listen for the hair thin squeak of the hummingbirds. Love your true friends.

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Others who participate:

• Shameless Agitator
  
• Joker on the Run

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