A World Full of Pain

While wars wage in probably three dozen countries around the world and starvation affects hundreds of millions, and while three cops are on trial in New York for shooting 51-bullets at three men in a car and while dozens of men and women wait on death rows, counting days, it sometimes seems hopeless around this planet and us humans.
And then I look at my family and the--most of the time--joy that hangs around us and our crazy broken-up selves, and I look at the trees starting to bloom and the wonder I've always found in that, and the flowers Madeleina and I planted the other day that are already about to burst into this world and make it just a little prettier today than it was yesterday, and I wonder how we can let the dark side out so often. Not just other people, myself in my angry tirade to Marco the other night, but most all of us. How did we let it get to this?
An email came yesterday from a mom who's son died two years ago in southern Texas. He was found hanging with a public park swing chain around his neck. Coroner called the reason for death undecided until the police claimed the kid was a known drug user, and then changed that to 'suicide'. The kid was kneeling on the ground. I've got the pics. For that kid to have died from suicide he must have worked at it long and hard because all he had to do to not die was stand, or raise himself up half an inch. The cops in the case have all been fired--at the same time, some months after the kid was found. And the coroner says the kid didn't start off high up on the chain and then slide down. He just apparently knelt, wrapped the swing chain around his neck and leaned forward.
Could be. Not likely.
And the mom wrote me asking for help. Help to close her wounds. Help to find out if her kid really did that to himself, impossible as it seems, or to find out who did it to him.
I know he's just one kid and millions are suffering, dying, living in fear right now. But he's that woman's kid. And so I've got to think: What if it was my kid? What if nobody would take my kid's death seriously? I'd reach out to strangers too.
So I'm going to make some calls and see if anything comes up. Not a real big chance, me not knowing the area and the officers off the force and the death being two years old. But you never know. Somebody might just be ready to spill the beans and maybe that mom can get her closure--whatever it might be--and then be ready to look out onto the Spring things blooming and the wonder of it all again.
It really is such an amazing and beautiful world. How the heck we get so wrapped up in the negative is a mystery.
All I would have had to do the other night with Marco was stop and look at that beautiful kid for a minute before I exploded and I wouldn't have. I'd have seen the beauty there, despite his button-pushing.
Just getting maudlin, I guess. Cause I'm an old hippie who thinks we ought to make love, not war. And we ought to feed everyone, which we could, just with our leftovers. And we all ought to take a look every now and then at the wonder around us.