The holocaust museum

Have you ever been struck in your belly or your chest in such a way that you wanted to give up right then and there? As in, you just wanted to quietly sit down right where you were, hunched over, and give up, in final defeat? With a voice that says...no more, no more...I don't want this anymore. That's enough. You can take it all back.

I felt like that often on the wards in Uganda, when a patient looked so sick and full of pain and death, visually expressed through sores on his face and body, large mushroom-like tumors growing out of his skin, or his little 2 year old girl standing, staring quietly at her sick father who was laying on the floor for lack of a real hospital bed. I felt like that again today at the national holocaust museum, watching videos of piles of stacked, diseased, emaciated bodies being bulldozed by liberating forces into mass graves for lack of a less disturbing or more efficient way of disposing of the dead. Or watching a holocaust survivor recount her ordeal of watching everyone she knew die, marching with sandals in the cold winter snow and snapping her frost-bitten toes off like twigs...with a sorrow and anger in her voice that would and could never forgive or forget. The sorrow and anger that are products of human indignity, fear, lostness, discomfort and hatred, and quite often lead much of the same, in another land, with other people. The same story, just different characters and subtle plot twists. A bomb here, a fiery political speech there, an unjust law over there and an unsettled heart and mind, always on the defensive, underneath it all.

Anyway, when I see disturbing things these days...I don't feel compelled to action as much as weak surrender. Some are angered and have the will to fight. That's good...maybe bad too. I on the other hand just want to sit in a corner and give up. All yours God. All yours world...you can have it all back, the good and the bad. There's no need for a me in this body...it can function on its own and do what it does without a person involved.