I dont know how Im going to tie some of my lifes stories together, but well see, my dear reader. Well see. When I was a little girl and my mom and I watched movies together, shed rarely cry about people being hurt or killed. Helen would lament the horses destroyed in their gallop with its soldier or in the exploding bombs... Animals are innocent, shed say, they dont cause wars. She reserved few tears for herself....life had been cruel and theres a point when tears for oneself are limited, while tears for others tragedies flow. (This is how it is for me the older I am though underneath it all the joy of being alive still sustains me.) Helen was a governess for the wealthy in Europe with an extremely soft place for children and animals She grew up as a displaced and orphaned war child Hungary sent to Switzerland by Hungarys programs for orphaned children. (She lived under Swiss foster parents care but those are other stories for other times.) Children must live the results of grownups actions...sometimes quietly and sometimes acting out. Sometimes dying like animals, valueless or merely collateral damage, and more recently just more numbers in systematic ethnic cleansing.....(At least some conquerors often adopted their enemy children and raised them as their own or as slaves. We seem to be returning to Charles Dickens times at the very least and Adolph Hitlers visions at the very worst.) Theres a wonderful story involving Gandhi. An Indian man was devastated, broken-hearted and filled with rage as Indias Arabs killed his son. He murdered a Muslim child in vengeance during the war between Muslim and Hindu, pre-Pakistan. As he could not see beyond his own pain and anger, he came to the Mahatma for guidance. Gandhi, in his wisdom told the man to find a Muslim orphaned boy, raise him as his own but allow him his Muslim religion. Quite a profound act of forgiveness and mercy. But I have digressed. In the war fought in Bosnia, I was stopped dead (so to speak) in my thoughts when I saw the ruins of a zoo, right in the middle of both sides of the war, a once proud lion, now emaciated and dying, peered through the bars at the photographer who clicked his picture. Looking into his eyes, the suffering I saw was indescribable. it reminded me of the photos I saw in Nazi concentration camps and, in particular, the photos of the group of children Mengele used in his experiments. And I remembered going to the Cleveland Zoo as a young child, making eye to eye contact with the gorilla in an iron cage (as they used to be kept quite inhumanely, I might add). I immediately started crying. Wordlessly, my mom knew and put her arms around me. My family has always *listened to the animals*, they too, have something to teach us. ~Anna
Posted on: Sat, 23 Aug 2014 11:30:06 +0000
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