Unacceptable Indeed

The plan was to tackle a particularly smart-looking puzzle, a crossword with a fresh twist in Friday’s New York Sun, which has been giving that other newspaper a run for its money lately. I was especially looking forward to it because it was by a constructor who once made a puzzle I had criticized, and here was an opportunity to follow up with praise for breathing life into an exercise that, over at the Times, can suffer from an inexorable sameness day after day.

The plan was aborted. For the time being, anyway. I’ll come back to it at some point in the future, when focusing so much attention on a puzzle feels like the right thing to do. Time spent deep in Puzzleland, not bearing witness to the dead and the grieving, seems somehow disrespectful.

Puzzleland, for those of us without developed spiritual practices who still need to cultivate a place in the mind apart from this world of betrayal and suffering, is the next best thing. In Puzzleland, there is no cancer, no hypocrisy, no government malfeasance. It is a clean and quiet virtual space where, instead of focusing on a single word, like om (which is out of the question anyway because it’s only two letters long), you open your thoughts to all the words in your memory. Laser-honed concentration silences hatred, injustice, and the voices that tell you you’re not good enough. And so, for a few moments every day, I acknowledge the many things in this world that I cannot change and make a trip to Puzzleland.

Except for weeks like this one. Puzzleland is for garden-variety, everyday crimes and misdemeanors. The enormity of the wrongdoing this time around, resulting in the unnecessary loss of so many human lives and of an irreplaceable cultural patrimony, renders acceptance unacceptable. All human suffering is deplorable. But when it is so preventable, and when it so directly correlates to the actions of a government that consistently looks the other way, acceptance seems treasonous.

I marvel how many times the American public accepts this same pattern as it is repeated again and again. After almost three thousand died in New York, while our leaders were looking the other way. And after even more innocent lives were lost in Iraq, allowing Osama bin Laden to escape capture while, once again, our leaders looked the other way. In parliamentary democracies, after such large-magnitude blunders, the government resigns in disgrace. It was nearly impossible to know what to say when the voters of this country, instead of demanding that Congress impeach the president for waging war under false pretenses, rewarded him with a second term of office.

What’s a person of conscience to do? It is too late to spend the money on shoring up the levees. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and that blood stains the hands of the administration that stopped paying for the efforts that might have prevented the annihilation of New Orleans while spending more and more on the debacle in Iraq instead. And while we as individuals send money for relief, we can’t help but worry whether those in charge have the competence to administer it.

The precedent that was set in California seems more attractive by the day. But even a recall at the federal level would take too long. This president, who claims to cherish human life, seems hell-bent on destroying it at every opportunity. We must stop him before he kills again. I love America and I want its citizens to enjoy their right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The best thing we can do for the future of our country is to call upon the administration to step aside and make room for someone capable of doing the job.