If You Had The Power

Gates Of Hell (Auguste Rodin)

“By trying very hard to improve things, I am often able to make them much worse.” (A. Brilliant, Pot-Shots #1044)

While driving home from work last night, I was lost in thought over a thread of conversation going on in Hassid & Heretic about the Tsunami. I passed my exit off the freeway without even noticing until I was already a few miles beyond it. Not that this was a big deal, since there is an awesome chicken joint down that way, and it proved to be an inadvertent excuse to enjoy some of Detroit’s best ‘broasted’ chicken. Daydreaming has a habit of leading me into pleasure and creativity.

There was a great deal of conjecture and wishful thinking going on in the conversation over the Tsunami. Isn’t there always? But this time it was different. I believe there is genuine and universal concern over this tragedy, and I think that much it comes from our feeling totally helpless in the face of catastrophic natural events such as this one. Why it takes pain and suffering en masse to bring people closer together, I will never know. Perhaps it is our own instinctual need for survival and communal bonding that reverts us back into our early evolution when we were, of necessity, living in groups to hunt, gather, and survive. Maybe it is out of a personal sense of helplessness in the face of a disaster of such magnitude, in which no human agent exists to blame or take responsibility for, and we have nowhere to turn but back onto each other for solace. I am hopeful that someday joy will affect humanity in the same measure.

What about this helplessness? Have you ever felt it personally? I felt it when my step mother o’h became sick. I felt it the when my son was born and my wife was in agony and I could no nothing. Fortunately, the doctor could, and so the situation, though out of my hands, wasn’t completely hopeless or without solution. I felt it when my father o’h succumbed to heart disease. I felt helpless when a woman I loved distanced herself from me and replaced me with another. I felt helpless when my emotions ran amok within me and shut down my rationale. I felt helpless when witnessing a friend sink deeper and deeper into drug addiction and eventually die from it. I feel helpless reading news articles about human suffering all around the world or seeing it on BBC. I remember seeing the squalor of Third World slums and feeling nothing but shame and helplessness for being a man with a few extra dollars in his pocket, and there being nothing that I could personally do to save every single one of those people. I see the mounds of bloated corpses of the Tsunami victims and feel the same fear. I feel a similar dread over such a thing that could occur to me or someone I love and does, in fact, occur to others all over the world. In the face of an ever expanding Universe, I remain a minute speck of bio-filth, set from conception to decay into my constituent parts and be consumed by the beings I deem lesser then my own sentient identity. What is man if not helpless?

BUT……

What if we weren’t so helpless? What if we had one power that we could utilize exactly when we or the world would need us to use it? What event would we change? What characteristic of Humanity or Nature would we alter for the betterment of everything? Imagine a Utopian ‘Genie in a bottle’ (but NOT a bottle of Jim Beam) of sorts, saying to you, “Shloymele, I know you’ve been worried about the world. Let me give you a chance to fix things once and for all! I know you cry when you see others suffering. How can I help you stop crying? For this I give you one power, one special ability, one time only, to change that which plagues your consciousness most! There is ONE condition though. You may dictate the doings, but NOT the outcome.”

I thought this would be an easy question to answer. It’s really, really not simple to even ponder. Think about all of the kindnesses we do with good in mind that backfire on us. It is almost a leap of faith to do anything! Helping a stranger? What if he/she doesn’t go away? What if the adage “No good deed goes unpunished" is true? I do not suggest that we stop being compassionate or benevolent, but that we realize the limited scope of our power as it is. It is for us to do as we are, NOT as we, or as we wish the situation to be. And what if doing nothing is the sometimes best thing we can do?

So much of the problems that we face in life come about as a result of unintended consequences. We believe we are doing good and righteousness and what happens? There grows from our good intents a demon we can never seem to exorcise! As they say “The road to Hell is paved with good intentions.” So what is there to do? As I pondered what I would do with such power, I thought about these unintended consequences that would arise from the repairs I would impose upon our seemingly flawed world. Call it a cost/benefit analysis of sorts. I like to plan ahead. Why fix a problem, only to have to spend more time fixing the problems created from the original fix? Why work harder and not smarter?

It didn’t take long for me to decline the Genie’s tempting offer. I don’t ever want that kind of power, even just once. Oh yeah. I thought about World Peace, end to human mortality, end to poverty, and the end to abuses and sufferings of all sorts. I imagined a world with little or no effort required to survive, to thrive, to exist, to grow, to be! I imagined replacing every frown, every scream, and every furrowed brow with one of joy and happiness! Oh what Heavenly bliss would ensue! And then, not a moment later, I, in a moment of sober contemplation, realized that all of this ease and comfort I was projecting upon others, when reflecting back upon my own life, and even given the chance, I would change little of my hardships and challenges, because those very challenges destroyed me, rebuilt me, hardened me, and eventually softened me in to the person I am today. Could I possibly, without guilt, remove those experiences from another, to limit their potential by removing all obstacles to it? My answer was a resounding “No.” I would be denying them the very thing that makes each one of them human and unique.

Dear Genie of the Bottle Utopia,

I must decline your generous offer of power, even for this one instance, and I would hope that in the future, one wiser than I would be offered such an opportunity. As a consolation, afford me the ability to see the good and usefulness in all things, no matter how evil they appear or how painful they may be. Allow me to rejoice in my helplessness and be as I am, helping others shamelessly without expectations or control of outcome within the limited capacity that I now possess. I am perhaps already the ‘god’ that I wish to be, why have more power than I need were it to prove dangerous? The little that I can still do as a man of mitigated power and understanding, I will continue to do. More than that, I cannot be trusted with.

Please let me cry. Let me cry the tears of others WITH them and not FOR them. Let those tears be the motivation to become all that I am, but not too much for my own good or the world’s best interests.

Sincerely,

Another Helpless Mortal

Tell me. If YOU had such power, how would you use it? Please let me know. I am very much interested in hearing what you think. Peace!