Can I Hide in Your Attic?
Either you’ll hide me in your attic or you won’t. It is only recently that I’ve questioned whether I’d do the same for you. Out loud anyway.
Is a person allowed to enjoy life if across the world children are starving or hiding in bomb shelters, or laying vulnerable in shattered hospitals?
I read about these things, watch their unholy images obsessively, and do nothing. There is nothing to do. A check? I did that, but it doesn’t make me feel better. Although, maybe it does. I felt the need to mention it here.
As a Jewish girl, I was taught early on about genocide and gas chambers and how a country of seeming friends can turn in a second. They will do things like call Jews in from all over Ukraine. They will line them up around ditches they’ve forced them to dig. In a sudden deadly squall, they will shoot through agonizing screams until all the victims settle into a pit of silent dead.
Almost 100 years later, the world and I watch the Russians destroy the memorial at Babi Yar in an effort to fight someone. Anyone. All over again.
I spent the entirety of my teen years sure I might as well be buried under a mass of body parts and that a nuclear bomb hitting New York was a foregone conclusion. It was a relief when it turned out I was wrong. So far.
My assessments are firm. Either you’ll hide me in your attic or you won’t. It is only recently that I’ve questioned whether I’d do the same for you. Out loud anyway. The answer is as it’s always remained. That depends.
My hyper vigil bent towards impending genocide has pointed me to torture the world over. Sudan, Somalia, Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor. I say this to you, though I may change my mind. I cannot bear the idea of sending my boys to die in a country my ancestors fled from 130 years ago, even before the Holocaust.
Once, a woman in a museum explained, despite my protestations, that the world, including the United States was culpable in the horror.
“They could have bombed the trains,” she said. A simple idea that haunts me. Either way, it’s not my finger on any trigger, nor my people bumped up to the foul line. For now.
I’ve never been comfortable with powerlessness, but what can I do? Donation doesn’t seem like enough. Do I welcome some refugees into my home? It’d be easy to say yes. We’ll never let them in.
My question at its core is, do I get to enjoy life despite other people’s suffering? Can I pay some of this empathy forward? When someone bombs a city to the ground, will any of my sadness help? If I loosen my grip on said empathy can I remain human?
If I was the sufferer, I wouldn’t give a shit what some comfortable woman half a world away thinks. Maybe it’s the most privileged position in the world to think your emotions matter at all.
Is there a right answer anywhere? Or just the more palatable excuses, a story people latch onto, despite its greased walls. Can you ever trust the news anymore?
Will you hide me in your attic? I’ve been the kindest person I’ve known how to be, but even people with perfect oral hygiene lose teeth.
Once I silence my phone, I am my own anthill to worry about. My husband and I futz around our house and try to stay in shape, our children are forging their own futures as long as circumstances don’t snatch them away. I can reel off a list of my deepest pain and loss, and it is visceral, but mostly interchangeable.
I reach into my own quarters, offering a helping hand to anyone who’ll take it. My own suffering has come from loving well, which is a wish I hold for every human. I am a good friend to those I love — a list I fervently hope remains ever expanding.
Madness is a permanent but moving target; I’m trying desperately to lean into the reprieves. Now, about that attic?
