My Shadow in the Walmart Parking Lot
It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.
- Sir Edmund Hillary
Why am I here and why do you have to be a mirror of what I don’t want to see, what I want to reject about our society and pretend is not happening? But I see you standing there mister e-cigarette man, verbally threatening action if those children bother you “one more time” for asking when you will be done smoking so they can get out of the car. You don’t want to be bothered so you slam your hand against the window shouting “shut the fuck up and be quiet” all the while my gut wrenches inside of me. I feel so helpless and , worse yet, I feel like my shopping here is letting down those children who are waiting in the car while I steal their future for a $2.29 t-shirt.
I’m so ashamed, I’m actually shopping because I want to buy something, I want to satiate my anxiety with some retail therapy, it’s only a cute t-shirt costing a mere $2.99. But whose back had to break so I could get something so cheap? How many fossil fuels were burned so I can have something made in China and imported to the United States that I don’t truly need? And now, as I am wracked with the guilt of even being here, wanting desperately to believe that I am different from those “out there”, like you Mr. e-cigarette man.
But who am I kidding?
What if I wasn’t at Walmart but was at Nordstrom’s, would I be any different? Would I be more justified in buying what I don’t need if I paid more for it? Or would all that mental masturbation to justify my actions be worse because now I am pretending to be “better than” you? Perhaps it is this thinking – this “I’m better than you” isolating shell I put around myself to protect me from you – where the true silent killer exists in America? For clearly I am dying without my connection to this other that I fear and am pushing away.
You sir are my shadow
Sebastian Junger in his book Tribe: On homecoming and belonging tells us about Skinwalkers (Navajo term) which is a name given to people who held acts of violence against themselves and their own people.
These were people who were in a culture that no longer valued them/dismissed them, wanting to cast them aside from the rest as "different" in some way...so they took their skills and turned inward, against society."
He reminds us that virtually every culture in the world has their version of skinwalkers. In Europe they were called werewolves (meaning literally man-wolf in old English).
Of the 57 million people who die every year, only 150,000 of those deaths (a mere one third of one percent 0.3%) are deaths caused by a stranger from a foreign country, war. Another 550,000 deaths are caused by violent attacks of a lone assailant in community (closer to one percent 0.9%) – which means you are three times more likely to die by an individual around you than a stranger in a faraway land. But the staggering number is the number of deaths from suicide, from our own hands. Officially the number is around one million deaths/year but unofficially the number is theorized to be closer to two million with a million more unsuccessful attempts. Why is this, why are we feeling so disconnected, so alone and full of fear?
It turns out we are far more likely to kill ourselves than die at the hands of another, especially war. Yet, in spite of this fact, the world spent 17 trillion dollars on fighting war last year, that doesn’t include the cost of reclaiming lives and land after the war, just the cost of going to war for nothing other than egos, power, and a false illusion of community called the nation state.
So why the heck do we spend billions and trillions of dollars fighting a fictitious enemy when the truest enemy is our replacement of the emotional bonds of family and community with state and market forces? Why do we continue to passively let million of our brothers and sister suffer in anguish, feeling like outsiders, unable to fit in, while we pour all our hatred and anger into an enemy “out there” rather than face the one “in here” so we can stop fighting ourselves and fearing each other.
Where do we turn to begin to heal the wounds of our past and to re-member our connection with the world around us? How do we facilitate our growth into initiated adults and elders so we can begin our journey to realize that we are not apart from any other person in this world, even Mr. e-cigarette man, but are a part of a larger community, a larger consciousness of living, a part of a larger heartbeat that our internal soul cries for us to remember?
