Talking Story 
by Polo

Massoud al Samouni was holding tight, in terror, in love, her bleeding baby boy. Two iron shards had torn his tummy apart. Two more children screamed at her legs. Outside their house, Israeli tanks were rooting Hamas fighters out of her neighborhood.

From The Asian Reporter, V19, #3 (January 20, 2009), page 7.

Last Saturday night, another wet winter night, while icy Pacific winds pushed hard on our old living room windows, we huddled under cozy comforters watching a Blockbuster video. Hushed.

That film’s leading lady was having her baby. Silenced we all were, inside our memories; Ama with hers, me for mine, our kids caught in theirs.

Humans can do that, be taken by another. Moviemakers, songwriters, and soap advertisers rely on it, earn millions by it — our instant inherent reach into what’s happening with other humans. Empathy.

Empathy. People have it, chimps and gray wolves and blue whales have it. We each know in our very bones what’s happening in another’s.

Birthing’s terror and hope, pain and joy, that’s what our Saturday night film star was playing, and that’s what each of us were feeling in our stilled living room. Tears unashamed as wolves’, tears big as whales’, sprinted down my cheeks. My pretty wife sobbed.

Sunday morning arrived like every Oregon mid-January morning arrives. Night refused retreat, dawn just wouldn’t rise. Getting up and getting out was hard. I propped high our pillows, switched on my bedside lamp, and clicked on OPB.

National Public Radio’s Eric Westervelt was reporting from Gaza City. Palestine.

In the story, Massoud al Samouni was holding tight, in terror, in love, her bleeding baby boy. Two iron shards had torn his tummy apart. Two more children screamed at her legs. Outside their house, Israeli tanks were rooting Hamas fighters out of her neighborhood.

We held almost as tight, my wife and me, to each other. In empathy with poor Mrs. Samouni; inside bad memories of our own.

We do this immediately, all of us mothers and fathers identifying with parents like her. With every parent everywhere. We empathize. We do it reflexively, especially those of us refugeed by our own awful leaders’ excesses.

I turned off my bedside lamp, suddenly too bright. To cover my grief. To cloak my wife and me with Sunday’s dark dawn. I clicked off our clock radio.

I turned Mrs. Samouni away because I’m afraid one more bad hit will burst this old broken heart. Because, I tell you true: I am here and warm and wealthy. Because we hide from faraway mothers’ sorrows, here, in tidy cul-de-sacs, in leafy America.

Let me try my best to recall how this lack of courage began.

When Big Brother and me and our squirrelly cousins came to Salem, our parents worked real hard, real late, to dress us well for the first day of school in September. To thank them, to impress our teachers, we boys devoured our U.S. history texts. We ate up pages of Union General William T. Sherman’s march across the stubborn Confederate South. We gobbled down big blue maps tracing Admiral "Bull" Halsey’s Seventh Fleet’s Pacific sweep — how he beat back and back and back Imperial Japan’s angry iron navy.

But in none of those stories did any of our boys see those Southern families’ burned houses, nor their broken babies. It was all about brooding presidents, Blue and Gray. It was about bold generals, and thick black arrows representing their hundred-thousand-man armies marching across paper. Across a kid’s history class.

None of those stories, not at Judson Junior High, not at South Salem High, told kids about men like our Opa, his broad back shredded between his rows of bok choi. How he was hoeing weeds. How he was not running fast enough when that American bomber came out of nowhere. Not once in six years of thick public school texts did their authors mention Mrs. Samouni’s baby boy or her handsome husband. Both gone.

At the end of our history class chapters, we were quizzed about the consequences of Abraham Lincoln’s or Admiral Halsey’s decisions. But we were not asked about what becomes of bitter mothers’ surviving children. Never a question about how fatherless kids keep warm or keep fed or keep calm without him. None of us suburban Salem school kids, all of us as empathetic as young people can be, heard that history. Felt that story.

Since Bull Halsey’s grand chapter, and our grandpa’s not so grand one — since day and night aerial bombing of Japanese cities forced the Chrysanthemum Emperor’s unconditional surrender — seven American presidents have sent overwhelming Yank military might into 12 other countries. Thirteen times if you count Iraq twice. I cannot count how often America’s only Middle Eastern ally’s army has done it to Palestine. I am afraid to know.

I am afraid to check our kids’ texts. It’s not those strategic battle maps, crafty generals, or winning commander-and-chiefs that keep me from looking. Tidak. It’s my Opa. It’s our moms. It’s the same reason we better not turn on our bedside radios, not first thing on a moody Oregon winter morn. It’s empathy. It’s our common humanity, our anguished Palestinian relatives and their terrified kids.

If I could. If this morning’s first cup of coffee were only strong enough, I would resolve that this year, this Ox New Year, this beginning of our Barack presidency, is the year we ask our school teachers what’s happened to history. Our history. Anxious moms’ and working dads’ history.

Because it can be done. We can ask urgent questions. We can know real stories. And we can act on them. American network media’s nightly reporting on our warring in Central Viet Nam’s villages, in crowded Saigon neighborhoods, made a whole other history happen because we witnessed a wholly different war. Not at all storybook. Totally brutal. Likewise, European Union TV crews dashing between units combatting block by block for Gaza City, transmitted that truth with all the immediacy of human emotion. With the speed of empathy. Outraged demonstrators, as many as those marching for Abraham Lincoln’s blue Army, hit the streets all over the continent. Elected leaders took notice. Acted right.

It can be done. It must be done, particularly by Portland’s newcomers, our immigrant and refugee families whose sorrow never made my high school history text, whose losses never earned chapter titles. Those who never got a picture or scored a quote need now make history books true. Make history our own.