Being and somethingness

Here in Northeast Pennsylvania, we have entered that time of the year when yellow blossoms are coming to life on the forsythia and daffodils, and the dead limbs of trees are falling to the ground on the wind.  It is one of the rites of spring that the flowers catch your eye, and the dead branches catch your feet.

At my age, tripping and falling becomes a real worry.  Former Senator Joe Lieberman died recently “due to a fall,” the announcement of his death said, and an old friend of mine in New York City was only recently sprung from the hospital and rehab after a fall that happened more than a month ago.  

So, I watch my step when I walk Ruby around the neighborhood on these bright mornings and blustery evenings.  The old trees in this neighborhood shed branches the way our cats shed fur, copiously and visibly.  The dead branches they drop are gray and mottled and blend in with the bluestone gravel sidewalks that run along either side of the streets in our town, so they’re hard to see.  For the aging, of which I am one, the fallen tree limbs are a hazard, so the town has dispatched workers to pick them up and cart them away.

I was walking Ruby the other afternoon when a town truck passed me, its pickup bed covered with the dead limbs of trees.  As the truck moved slowly along, the driver and his assistant watched along the sides of the street for fallen tree branches.  I saw them stop and pick up one of them.  The limb was two inches in diameter at its stem, a tangle of smaller branches fanning out from there.  Then they got back in the truck and proceeded down the street.

I was thankful for the two men, town employees, probably maintenance workers when not on dead limb patrol.  They are doing a job that if you weren’t picking your way through the knotty mess of dead branches littering the ground right now, you probably wouldn’t notice.  Just another municipal truck going about its business, on its way to clear the grate on a sewer or collect some traffic cones left over from the St. Patrick’s Day parade.

The dead tree limbs littering the streets and sidewalks in the spring are why we have mayors and town councils and county boards of supervisors.  They are part of the reason we pay taxes and vote in elections when they come along.  The dead branches of trees are not going to be picked up by volunteers working for free, any more than our country will be defended by volunteers, or our police officers will protect us out of the goodness of their hearts, or our children will be taught by saints giving of themselves for the betterment of mankind.

I flew on Spirit Airlines to Tennessee last week, and when the plane broke out of the clouds on approach, I looked down on the rooftops of thousands of homes and apartment buildings along hundreds of streets as the plane descended, all of them organized into neighborhoods in small towns around Nashville.  They were probably not unlike the town where we live, or you live – people with jobs paying taxes so they can live their lives in relative comfort in places that are cared for in much the same way this small town in Northeast Pennsylvania takes care of its streets and sidewalks with police forces and municipal workers so that children are safe and old people don’t trip and fall on fallen branches.

I was briefly astounded by the vision I had out the window of the plane of all those houses containing all those people doing pretty much what we all do every day.  Multiply what I saw a thousand times – no, a hundred thousand times – and you’re looking at our country.  Human beings are confounding enough taken one by one, but put together in the kind of web of existence you can see from an airplane window – seen, in effect, as a country – it’s overwhelming.  I thought, can you imagine running to be the president of all this?  All these towns, all these school systems, all these municipal workers, all these fire departments, all these courts and police forces and rivers that overflow their banks and forests that catch fire and tornados that blast through it all taking lives and flattening homes and businesses and creating despair where moments before there was hope?

They keep saying that our politics is broken and split by disaffection and lies.  But on the ground, the roads and streets still connect the homes and towns and city halls, and somewhere down there, a truck drives through a neighborhood picking up the fallen branches of trees so old men like me don’t end up in the hospital or even worse, in the ground. 

Nothing happens on its own, shorn of thought and intention and action brought to bear by our collective will.  Empathy is the way we understand each other.  Without empathy, we cannot be the web of effort that comprises a civilized people.  We have struggled for thousands of years to better ourselves as humans.  There are ruins all over the world, including right here in this country, that mark the failures in our systems of belief, in our governments, in our humanity. 

But we are not finished yet.  We can bridge the gap between our hopes and dreams and the reality we face with action.  It’s not nothingness, it’s somethingness.  Politics is the way we care for each other.  We vote; therefore we are.