TIME AFTER TIME ...

"But you tell me over and over and over again my friend Ah, you don't believe we're on the eve of destruction" - Bob Dylan, The Eve of Destruction

When the first atom bomb was tested in the desert of New Mexico J. Robert Oppenheimer misquoted the Bhagavad Gita saying, “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.” Oppenheimer substituted the word “death” for the original “time” because he realized what he had just seen. When Oppenheimer said it there was a general consensus that the statement was filled with remorse, a good deal of ego, yes, but a sorrow that went well beyond words because he realized that the destructive power of what he had engineered, with the help of many of the greatest scientists of the day, was a power only the gods could live with and he knew that there was a terrible hubris in placing yourself amongst the gods. When Donald J. Trump says, “A whole civilization will die tonight,” no one suspects that there is any remorse in the statement. Plenty of ego, yes, but there is no sense of sorrow that he plans to destroy a civilization that is 5000 years old, the oldest continuing civilization in the history of the world, that children, women, old men and their partners, art and antiquities signifying the depth and the breadth of the humanity of this civilization will be obliterated and in future will exist only as memory. There is only bragging. When Trump says something like that he is simply flexing his muscles, kicking sand, bellowing into the wind. Oppenheimer’s words heralded the tragedy that humanity would carry as it trudged into the future. Trump’s are just a fat old man foaming at the mouth because his brain has collected too much plaque around the cells. Trump’s words are a threat while Oppenheimer’s were a reaction to and a warning about an action already completed.

We tend to think - although in this case it is more like hope - that one generation will learn from the actions of prior generations. Yet here we are again. We have the power to destroy each other many times over but we value life and the creative energy of human beings enough that we avoid that power and vow not to be careless in its usage. But now, today, one man, a man lost in his own dreams of himself, a man wandering around in the empty halls of his own mind, has the power to unleash a destructive power 80 times more powerful than the bomb that scared J. Robert Oppenheimer. If he does not go that far he can still annihilate the entire population of a country, destroy their infrastructure, and make it impossible for anyone to rebuild and generate life ever again in that place. That is what Donald J. Trump is saying he will do and yet no one will stand up and say, “You’re mad. Get over yourself and please, leave the room. Let the grown-ups do their work.” For at least ten years the American people have not taken him seriously. Many times what he says he will do seems absurd and impossible and yet he does it, or tries to do it. He is still trying to deport 3000 immigrants every day. He is nowhere near that promise yet he continues to try and therefore a five year old boy is taken into custody, fathers are taken away from their children, mothers, too, are separated from their young ones, American citizens and people doing everything they are told to do by law in order to become citizens of this country are taken up, detained, treated poorly, and deported; forty-five people have died in I.C.E. custody since he took office and two, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti were shot down and died on the streets of Minneapolis. And yet he continues.

The people of Minneapolis demonstrated every day, they said no every day, and eventually they were left alone with their grief. They allowed themselves to live together in their loss. In their grief they found community. They may have found salvation, not in a religious sense but in a spiritual sense. In the Quran 5:32, it says that the saving of one life is like the saving of all humanity and the killing of one innocent person is same as killing all mankind. It speaks to the sanctity of all life. We all mourn together, our grief is shared, and through our loss, our shared grief, we come together and bind ourselves to a community. This community of Americans is suffering the great loss of our innocence now at the hands of this man and the people who manage him and shout his words. It’s okay. As long as we come together and have each other, love each other, grieve for each other, we will survive and art will thrive because art is born of our understanding that we have but a moment here and all we leave behind is what we have created.