Sunshine Is Often a Choice

by Mona Shaw

We starve, look at one another, short of breath

Walking proudly in our winter coats

Wearing smells from laboratories

Facing a dying nation of moving paper fantasy.

Forty years ago this past spring, I was on a planning committee with my best friends Tom, Michael, and Stephen to take our college freshman theater class to see Hair in Chicago.  We had just organized an anti-war demonstration triggered by Nixon's bombing escalation in Cambodia. 

Tom had been released from the V.A. hospital, after being gravely wounded as a Marine in Vietnam.  His right forearm still had a huge purple gash, and his right hand was still paralyzed from shrapnel.  He was uncommonly handsome and exuded confidence and charisma, except for those times when he dove and then trembled under a table or bench when a car back-fired or fireworks sounded and sucked him back into a jungle in Southeast Asia.

"There's got to be a better way," he whispered to a room one night, while fiddling with the fringe on my handmade patchwork poncho.

The quickening intimacy between us surprised everyone, including me.  The white-trash girl from the poorest neighborhood and the golden boy from one of the most affluent neighbors in town would not have sat at the same lunch table in high school.  But our amalgamation made perfect sense to him, and he demanded it.  I felt his constant stares soon after his arrival at junior college.  He wouldn't have been at this school had he not "patriotically" chosen to enlist in the Marines despite his parents' protestation.  He was biding time until he transferred to Lawrence the following fall.  I avoided him and scurried away each time he tried to speak with me.  I'd been burned enough as some rich kid's do-gooder project; he could adopt someone else.  Oh, yes he affected me, terrified me really.  I didn't admit this then, but I feared that allowing him close would leave too huge a mark, and I didn't want it.  One day in class his eyes burned holes into my belly as I gave an interpretive reading from Nevil Shute's On the Beach.  I had to sprint from class that day to keep him at bay.  However, he found me at a party that night and begged me to go outside and talk for just five minutes.

"I only came here to see you," he said, "I need you."

"What for?"  I answered feeling swallowed by his intensity.

"You have to help me end the war," he answered patently.

"Really?" I said sarcastically, "Vietnam or the war on the poor or the war on Black folk or just any ole war that might come along?"

"They're all the same war," he said. "and you know it."

The only response I could give, of course, was "Okay." 

Hair was more than a musical.  It was a movement.  The lyrics and melodies reflected the hopes and fears of all the years.  I have yet to witness anyone after listening to it who remained unaffected. Things were changing.  Everyone felt it, and Hair told us what was changing, and that the change was good.  It was a movement and Michael and Stephen joined us.  Grandma Cory would often say then, "The four of you are something."

I've been an activist now for almost 50 years, beginning on a strike picket line at the factory where my mother worked when I was ten.  I spend some of my sabbatical reflecting on this and all the "movements" since in which I have taken part.  Had I known back then, that things would not been become better decades later, but much, much worse.  I think my heart may have been too shattered, as they say, to keep on keeping on.

As it is, my heart is shattered plenty, and I mourn with every pore despite the unparalleled joy I paradoxically know through my two-year-old granddaughter Wrigley.  Tom died 38 years ago now, Michael 14, Stephen 7; and Grandma Cory 24.  I don't see evidence that we accomplished much.  So, when I take Wrigley for a walk to St. Vinnie's thrift shop, and I see a woman there wearing a faded t-shirt that reads, "Jesus died for our sins," I want to take her in my arms and weep.

"Yes, sure, but don't you get it?" I want to say. "People die for our sins every second.  It's more common than summer mosquitoes.  Millions upon millions—in war, lack of healthcare, AIDS/HIV, dying, dying, dying from all manner of greed and corruption.  Do you understand this government funding we bicker about is a paper fantasy?   And not just people, we're killing all the animals in Ecuador, the Gulf, the North Pole.  We could change this.  We could, but we're broke, financially and spiritually.  We're more Orwellian than Orwell: lying is truth, cowardice is prudence, media manipulation is called information.  Selfishness and avoiding pain/compassion are called emotional stability.  We don't just engage in denial; we're wed to it in our pretense that it's not as bad as we know it is.  I'm ready, like Dostoevsky, to give up and just write for no one who will ever read it about our inevitable demise."

I don't tell her this.  Instead Wrigley and I stroll to Dingman House. In the front hallway; Wrigley notices a poster on the ceiling for the first time.

"What's that?" she asks me.

"Honey, that's a photo of Earth."

"It's so beautiful!" she exclaims in yet untarnished wonder.

How can I not yearn for a better world for her?  Love still can trump the deepest despair.  Later, in my prayers, the paraphrased words of the martyr Harvey Milk stitch to my soul, my sin and salvation.

"If you want a world where people care about others, then care about others, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where people put their body on the line for justice, then put your body on the line for justice, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world where we love our enemies, then love your enemies, and you will live in that world.  If you want a world with forgiveness, then forgive and you will live in that world.  If you want a world that is gentle and kind, then be gentle and kind and you will live in that world."

"Somewhere, inside something,

there is still a rush of Greatness….

Let the sun shine in."