Hold Still. It Will Be Over Soon.

I was in Honduras in 2009 during the coup d’etat. It was mostly safe to travel. I talked with cab drivers and locals about scuba diving, food and family, but stayed off the streets at night. When military personnel boarded the bus I was on and ordered all of the men off, I gave them my passport, smiled politely, and waited for permission to proceed to my destination. One night in Copán I heard gunfire. Perhaps it was celebratory, perhaps not, but I stayed in my room and told myself: Hold still. It will go away.

A friend recently asked me if I realized the United States had been at war for a decade. I hadn’t. I was a sophomore in college in 2001, so most of my adult life has been spent in a climate of fear in a country that’s been in a perpetual state of war. It made me think of a line by the poet Ingeborg Bachman: “War is no longer declared,/it is continued.”

I realize I’ve had the same mentality about the U.S. as I did about Honduras. Hold still. Surely it can’t last forever. And most of the time, it’s easy to forget. There are elections or a debt crisis or a tragedy at home that detracts from that decade long fact. Adrienne Rich once wrote: ”And how have I used rivers, how have I used wars 
to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
not the crimes of others, not even our own death, 
but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough.”

I am implicated in this statement. I have used writing to escape, and when I have written about war, I’ve done so indirectly. I’ve held still and waited for it all to pass. I’ve accepted my vanishing freedoms. In part, it’s fear. One morning when I was traveling in Russia, I walked past a man who looked like he’d been beaten. At that time, it was the most physically injured person I’d ever seen. That kind of damage to the body was unfathomable to me. I wanted to help, but when I turned to another man on the street I realized I didn’t even know the word for help. All I could say in Russian was yes, no, please, thank you, and one ticket. Would anyone understand if I pointed at the injured man and just said: “Please! Thank you!”? Just like the gunfire at night in Honduras, the sense that I was powerless was absolutely crippling. What good would it do to rush out into the street that night in Copán? Who could I possibly help? That action would most likely endanger me, but my inaction still made me feel complicit in the suffering of others.

Recently, at a writer Q&A in Portugal, a Portuguese writer quoted a philosopher who believed humanity has not yet begun. He said one day the person will be born that cannot bear the suffering of others. That statement seemed both hopeful and hopeless. Yes, I believe that someday the world will become intolerant of war, genocide and murder. But what do we do now? What do we say? How do we stop the suffering of other? What is the word for help in every language? Please! Thank you!

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