Picking up Pieces

Yesterday, Bush, in some haste, I suggested that one way for me to fully comprehend the effects of the previous day's slaughter of 47 Iraqis in Thursday's mosque bomb attack would be to close my eyes and imagine myself being blown to pieces 47 times, one per second. The idea came to me from a discipline I learned from a Tibetan Buddhist-trained teacher, who invited me to meditate each day for three weeks on the myriad ways in which I might die that day, and to visualize in detail the physical aspects of that death.

It was, as you can imagine, no easy task. But the experience returned to me as I read about that bombing, along with the acknowledgment of how little such news impacts us these days. A bombing here, a shooting there, a mortar or an air attack, the downing of an aircraft. We read about them every day. We even see them, quite graphically, on the television screen. But we still manage to distance ourselves from these events. They're happening to someone else, far away from the safe breakfast room where we sit reading the paper or watching the morning news. We're protected from the actual reality by our own feelings of safety and comfort.

That's why I came up with the suggestion for you, Bush. You sit in your White House far from the events that continue to result, daily, from your choices. In your public life, in your speeches, you celebrate what you believe to be the beneficial results--such notions as freedom and democracy. So my invitation to you--and to myself--was to get real. For the space of forty-seven seconds, to get real.

I tried taking a bit of my own medicine during my meditation this morning, Bush. I tried visualizing my own body being blown to pieces forty-seven times. I couldn't actually do it. The best I could do was get to nine before my mind balked and turned away. Then I came back and tried again. The moment of the blast, the last, slow nanoseconds of heightened consciousness. The head being severed, blown off in the blast. Limbs flying apart, arms, legs, torn away from the body, mingling with the torn-off limbs of forty-six other of my fellow human beings. Abdomen splitting open, bowels tumbling out. Ribs tearing, lungs, heart spilling out into the street. Bits of brain blasted from the shattered skull. Cocks and balls torn from the pelvis, flyhing off...

And the blood. Blood spilling, gushing, spurting, spattering. Blood pooling everywhere, the pool of my blood spilling over into the pool of the next man's blood. Clouds of blood bursting, spraying. Life blood. And the agony of realizing in those last nanoseconds of life that this is death, and the rage of refusal, the slow, terrible, inevitable acceptance. The relinquishing of everything I have known, and loved, and valued in this life, and the final acknowledgement that my belief that it would last forever was nothing but delusion.

Forty-seven times. Forty-seven seconds. That was the challenge, at least, Bush. As I say, I made it to around nine before my mind found ways to divert itself from this nasty task I'd set it. But I did achieve at least part of my goal, I did catch a glimpse or two of the results of your war. And it seemed a whole lot more real, I tell you, Bush, than your high-sounding words. Try it out for yourself some time. You'll see.