Compassion

While strange and hurtful things have happened to us while we have been in NJ, some events malevolent even, in recent months I have felt the resurgence of my compassion.

I see who is watching and quoting Jersey Shore and living vicariously through this MTV Show. It’s the bright young girls who work at Target in Middletown. No one is offering them opportunities to go to college. I want to scoop them all up and take them under a protective wing. I want to see the world offer them tuition and scholarships, a chance to do more and be more. They deserve more than the tv version of Jersey Shore.

I feel sad for people here. They have not been treated well and they have not treated others well.
Their lands and beaches are very littered.
They may have had subpar medical services.
They are too densely packed together.
A lot of their land is leftover Superfund site.
The affluent neighbors poison their yards all year round because they think that is what you do.
They compete and they are stressed and exhausted.
They try to outrun each other, and they run each other off the roads.
The roads are half pothole by this time of year.
Left turns are not permitted and jug handles mean changing ones mind or missing a turn are hassles and punished.
Things are very expensive.
Everyone is competing or being competed against.
So it actually sucks to be predator and prey, but of course prey more.

Look how tired the women look.

Look how no one has a hand on the wheel because there is a cell phone, a cigarette, a gold card, and then you need to flip someone off, so who is steering? Who is driving you? What is driving you?

The church is still very patriarchal. It marches down to Planned Parenthood and protests, while behind it the Catholic School girls roam the streets of Red Bank wearing the pornographically short skirts of their school uniforms. When school lets out in the afternoons, it’s like a strange Britney Spears music video, and it seems inappropriate that adult men would see so much of under age girl’s thighs.

And the church would fight so hard to keep family planning out of reach.

The people’s energy here, partly due to the crowdedness I think, is channeled collectively into sports and politics and church, and there is not a lot of room for the feminine or feminist spirit. For cooperation. For organic time or ways to use the land.

And these people bore the brunt of the terrorist attacks, and watched buildings fall, and breathed ashes.

We became afraid of people when we lived here.
Sometimes I had thought that all of the people in NJ needed to be sent to their rooms!
But this is changing.

There are all these sick and sad and lonely people here, and I want to help them. This is so much more like the real me. I have come through something, and while in the midst of it sometimes I did not recognize myself, I find at the clearing at the other edge of the woods, I am me.

I am myself, again.


(photo of graffiti taken Jan 2011 in Red Bank, NJ, on corner by 7-11. It reads 'Fall In Love' but also 'Ray is an Asshole' on a sticker someone took the time to make.
In NJ, the background is the foreground.)