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Column Then the squirrel darted into traffic
By JEANNETTE BATZ
Bored with the traffic jam, I turn
my head toward the tiny movement, a gray blur at the edge of my peripheral
vision. The opposite lane clears, and a BMW driver revs his cars sleek
engine, its wheels rolling soundlessly past me, two inches away from a
barely-fuzzed tail. Huge black shadow, hot metal, vibrating asphalt -- the baby
squirrel darts left, toward the safety of the sidewalk. Then he changes his
mind and veers straight into the path of a Jeep. No! Go back! I
cry, rolling down the window as though he knows English. Go
back!
He veers again, then freezes. Stands in the middle of the lane,
his tiny ears pointed, his sparse soft tail at half-mast. Danger, he is
definitely in danger. Which way should he go? How did he get himself into this
mess anyway?
I know the feeling. Holding my breath, I pray hell run back
to safety.
Instead he crosses under my wheels.
Should I honk? Would that panic him even more? My turn to freeze,
hoping. Finally he emerges from under my old Sentra and dashes into the lane
next to me. Stop, I yell, seeing a big boat of an Oldsmobile grow
larger in my rearview mirror.
I cannot bear to watch this baffled baby squirrel die.
Theres been too much death already, I think. I dont care if
hes just a squirrel, hes alive right now and he didnt ask for
this, nobody gave him a traffic manual, nobody fenced off his tree.
The Oldsmobile brakes, and the little guy makes it to the grassy
lawn. Reassured by the familiar texture, he leaps across the sidewalk into the
vast greenness of Forest Park. I breathe a long sigh.
Someplace far away, I hear a fury of honks, and I accelerate
automatically, driving on to work. For half a minute, that squirrel has
mattered more than anything else in the world. Now that he is, at least
temporarily, safe, I have the luxury of wryness. More than 5,000 infinitely
storied, rich, complex human lives lost in a global act of terror, thousands
more lost in retaliation, and Im worried about a squirrel?
OK, so hes not a symbol-making creature who defies both
instinct and common sense by interpreting modern art. He cant even
deconstruct buttery hints of oak and pear in a glass of Chardonnay. He knows
danger, though, and he knows the sick confusion of seeing no clear path of
escape. His panic, in that split second on the road, sent the same adrenaline
coursing through his tiny bloodstream that courses through yours and mine,
triggering an electrical storm of impulses in his simple brain.
I forget about him, of course. But a few days later, paging
through the most recent copy of The Sun, I find Rebecca Seiferles
description of a man running from the World Trade Center. Balding,
bespectacled, his round form covered in gray dust, he had been running
headlong, but now he moved this way and that, in confusion, as if uncertain
where he was or where he needed to go.
I sit a minute, thinking how common lifes patterns are. We
set up elaborate hierarchies of suffering, measuring pain by numbers and
proximity and how readily we can empathize with it. Then we hurl those
comparisons at each other, making sharp political points. Remember how urgently
we waited for a body count? Five thousand dead at the World Trade Center, we
say to the world. The Taliban starts counting, and we say their numbers
cant be confirmed. Some five thousand children a month dead because of
sanctions against Iraq, liberals keep pointing out. Nearly 1 million Tutsis,
murmurs my husband, slaughtered in a civil war the United States ignored
entirely.
Those political points need to be made. We care more about people
who are like we are, we care more when we think we could suffer the same fate.
Numbers can remind us of our biases, and our hypocrisy, and our enemies
losses, and our own good fortune.
Squirrels can remind us of far greater dangers to far more complex
beings.
Yet, in the end, the comparisons are spurious. The squirrel wants
to live, and he fights for survival as instinctively as we do. His struggle is
congenial to me because it is so recognizable, and because he is so helpless. I
empathize with his cartoon flight.
Then my neurotic friend Jill calls, working herself up to fever
pitch over the traffic flow in her subdivision, and I go cold. People are being
tortured, I think to myself, and youre worried about the yield sign? This
is not helpless, this is merely petty.
Jills world is small on purpose, her rage channeled narrowly
because her mind floods so easily, drowning in doubt and fear every time she
ventures farther.
And that, too, is a kind of suffering, and who am I to weigh it?
I, who listen every day to people in serious trouble, yet continue to whine
about the exquisite pain of my sinus headaches?
We are human, and we are limited, and we deal with what is most
immediate. The trick would be to expand what is immediate until it includes
lives very different from our own. If we had that courageous an imagination, we
wouldnt be able to diminish half the worlds suffering by distancing
it, or trivializing it, or one-upping it. We could stop judging pains
merits and stop rationing our love.
Jeannette Batz is a staff writer for The Riverfront
Times, an alternative newspaper in St. Louis. Her e-mail address is
jeannette.batz@rftstl.com
National Catholic Reporter, November 23,
2001
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