Beyond the Snow Belt
by: Mary Oliver
Over the local stations, one by one,
Announcers list disasters like dark poems
That always happen in the skull of winter.
But once again the storm has passed us by:
Lovely and moderate, the snow lies down
While shouting children hurry back to play,
And scarved and smiling citizens once more
Sweep down their easy paths of pride and welcome.
And what else might we do? Let us be truthful.
Two counties north the storm has taken lives.
Two counties north, to us, is far away,--
A land of trees, a wing upon a map,
A wild place never visited,--so we
Forget with ease each far mortality.
Peacefully from our frozen yards we watch
Our children running on the mild white hills.
This is the landscape that we understand,--
And till the principle of things takes root,
How shall examples move us from our calm?
I do not say that it is not a fault.
I only say, except as we have loved,
All news arrives as from a distant land.
Oliver is dead on with her wisdom here: all news does arrive as from a distant land. It doesn't matter whether we're talking about a killing blizzard or oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico or school shooting in Florida. Unless the news involves people or places we have loved, it's merely words. No faces or names or photos of bombed-out buildings can change this fact. Unless it's the face or name of a loved one--unless we have lived in that bombed-out building--we remain apathetic and/or indifferent. Unmoved from our calm.
I have friends and family members who live in their own realities. They think that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. They insist that the global pandemic was merely a hoax perpetrated on the world by foreign powers and elected officials--those millions of people who died, just characters in a fable designed to scare us. And the insurrection on January 6, 2021, in Washington D. C. was just a bunch of sight-seeing tourists.
If you believe any one of those statements in the previous paragraph, you should probably stop reading this post now. Turn on Fox News, Go listen to Sean Hannity. Attend the nearest KKK rally. Cover your head with tinfoil so the government can't read your thoughts. Or, to put it in terms you might understand better (and I will type this very slowly for you): you . . . are . . . fucking . . . stupid.
Just because it isn't snowing in my neck of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan right now doesn't mean that the storms to the west and east are fairy tales. I don't have to shovel ten inches of snow to know that winter is raging around me and that people are getting buried in white tonight.
Facts are facts, no matter how many times you say "fake news" in five minutes.
So, as we go about our holiday shopping, prepare our holidays feasts, we need to remember the facts: there are people cold and starving in this country while billionaires buy jets and yachts and figure out ways not to pay taxes. Thousands of Ukrainians have died, millions more have become refugees, and entire cities have been reduced to rubble since the Russian invasion a year ago. The Middle East is a tinderbox of violence, edging closer and closer to nuclear war.
Now, imagine that hungry homeless person is your sister or son. Imagine that your grandmother is a Ukrainian citizen living in a bombed-out apartment building in Kyiv, and imagine your daughter lives in Gaza with her family.
Each far mortality involves someone's mother or grandmother or sister or son. None of us are beyond the snow belt on this Beaver Moon night.
Saint Marty has his snow shovel ready.
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