Life Matters (This Is Not a Political Post)

Being a parcel of humanity amidst nearly 3,000 flags is a sobering thing. Even without knowing the meaning behind them, when the only sounds are your own breath and the flags' flapping, something is stirred in you that makes you stop and realize that you are very small.

   "Hello." I turned over my shoulder, a bit miffed that someone would interrupt my sobering experience. He was a man with vivid dark hair and complex eyes that had seen a lot of life.
   "Hi." I responded in the friendliest tone I could assemble while trying to retain some of the somberness of the moment.
   "What do these flags mean?" I started to answer, and paused. I looked at him standing in front of me naively anticipating my response, and I knew that the moment I told him the flags' meaning his experience would change. I held power over this situation, and that was a strange feeling.
   "Each flag stands for a life lost at 9/11." I waited for his reaction. He looked down, expressionless.
   "Oh...wow." The silence was filled with the sound of the flags. "I buried my brother that day." My senses froze as all else fell away. "I was lowering him into the ground when those towers fell."

It felt like my throat had been stung by a million bees.

I evoked a very unauthentic sounding "I'm so sorry" as I knew nothing I could say would alleviate or be able to relate to what he had been through. Another few moments passed with the fluttering flags. "Would you like a popsicle?" I asked. He nodded. I ran down the hill to grab one of the melty pineapple popsicles in my car from my market trip. When I returned, we ate our popsicles in the 105 degree sun and talked about life and how pineapple was both of our favorite flavor. His name is Raymond, and I remember that because after a few times of trying to remember it he reintroduced himself as, "Everybody loves...?"

Raymond will never know the impact he had on me.

After that day, my thinking expanded to realize the flags' deeper meaning. Those flags are an absolutely beautiful thing that Pepperdine does to honor the lives lost in 9/11, and by no means am I undermining it. But Raymond made me realize that there were many other tragedies that day. There was probably a mother holding her still-born, a widowing drunk driving collusion, a heart attack leaving grandchildren with mere memories of their grandpa, and Raymond's brother was lowered into the earth. We are desensitized to the fact that every siren could be someone else's life-altering event.

The Matthew 10:11 verse of "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? But not one of them will fall to the ground outside of your Father's care" took a new meaning to me as well. It made me truly realize that life matters.

Gun violence has taken over 3,000 in Chicago just in 2015, so far there has been a 78% increase of police officers shot and killed this year, 194 African Americans have been shot by police just this year, 6,000 killed in interracial violence in 2015, 2,150 Americans die each day from cardiovascular disease (that's one every 40 seconds), 589,430 people died of cancer in 2015, and at least 212 homeless people died just last year. These few stats are barely scratching the surface of deaths in America, and they're not even mentioning the tragedies in other countries. Forgive me if these statistics are off, but even just one unjust or premature death is one too many for me.

Black Lives Matter, All Lives Matter, Gay Rights, Women's Rights... There are so many movements vouching for their place in humanity, and rightfully so. Humanity is twisted, and I don't think I'll ever be able to wrap my mind around the discrimination that some have suffered. But the interwoven thing I've noticed throughout them all is that they allude to individual lives. When you look up lives in the dictionary, it just redirects you to the root word: life. Although life may be seen as an individual right (my life), grammatically, the word is the same when the adjective is plural (our life), and I don't think grammar has made an accident.

Souls are individual, and I believe all souls are just tapping into the shared existence of life, like many people drinking from the same river. Violence is high, health problems rampant and there are countless claims to the answer: Republican, Democrat, politics, religion, medicine. I don't know the answer, and as all these "answers" are formed in a minuscule, limited, decaying human perspective, I don't think I'll ever know the answer. But I know what is important. Souls are important. Life is important. And according to God (the all-knowing, life-breathing entity that is so much bigger than us), even the life of a sparrow worth less than a penny matters.

I don't know the right political action to take. I don't know if there is one answer. Maybe there is. But I know what I need to do: "Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another (Romans 12:13-16, but you should go read the whole thing, really)." I need to mourn with the souls mourning. However different they or their situation is from mine, whether I can relate to their pain or not, whatever depth or size of their suffering, my heart will break with theirs. I will mourn with our Nation, I will mourn with 9/11, I will mourn with those different than me, and I will mourn with Raymond on a grassy hill while we eat pineapple popsicles in the silence of the flags.