Sometimes we can feel very small.
This isn't always bad. It's like being in the woods at night, far from city lights, and you look up and see a sky that looks like powdered sugar spilled on black velvet. You don't feel insignificant or powerless as much as you feel like a part of a beautiful silent machine. You see infinity and know why we have words like "awe."
There are a couple of theories regarding why man is the only religious animal. One holds that we developed it as a way to cope with the horrible and sure knowledge of our own deaths. The other holds that our divine maker touched it off in our hearts. Some of us become furious when what we think we know is challenged, furious enough to kill the infidel. Some of us genuinely believe in our right to murder for our god.
Most of us grow up doing what we are told to do by our parents and other people in positions of authority. It's sometimes hard to say where our moral instruction stops and our own reason begins. Sometimes when people question ideas that have been ingrained in us, it feels like an attack. Some of us find it very hard to imagine no countries, or that we might not be especially favored by whatever higher powers may exist.
It is difficult to imagine how other people can be cruel to innocents, but most of us would suborn or commit any crime given the right circumstances. Most of us are broken in small ways; we owe more to fortune and circumstances than we are often willing to admit.
When I visited my mother recently, she told me a story I had never before heard.
When I was a little boy, not yet old enough to go to school, she was driving the family car with me in the front seat and my baby sister in the back when an oncoming car crossed the center line and crashed head-on into the car traveling next to us.
None of us were hurt. There wasn't a scratch on our car, but those in the other cars were killed. My mother told me it felt like an explosion had gone off beside us. It was loud and visually disconcerting, as though the colliding vehicles were blown apart from within.
My mother remembers the chrome, the glass and the blood. She remembers hearing metal ticking in the aftermath. She remembers pulling over to the side of the road, shaking and crying and probably fumbling for a cigarette. She remembers pulling me to her, hugging me.
I don't have any recollection of this incident. My mother is shocked that our close call with death isn't one of the signal moments of my life. She says she still thinks about it all the time, how had she picked the other lane that day none of her children would have had the chance to grow up. She says she can't believe we never talked about it.
My mother may be inclined to think that she was being watched over that day. I tend to think we all obliviously dodge bullets until one connects. We are lucky until we're not. Our very existence is miraculous.
It's not hard to understand why my mother remembers the accident and I don't--she saw people killed before her eyes. I was too young to register what had happened. Her world went sideways, she was traumatized by what she understood could have happened.
I can think of times when the world went sideways on me: some of those times are personal, like when my father died or the day I met my future wife for the first time. Some of them I share with millions. I was in a newsroom when the space shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986. There was Sept. 11, 2001. There was Nov. 22, 1963.
And there was Nov. 13, 2015. Paris is a special place to me. We often go there in November for our anniversary.
I have never been to Beirut or Damascus. I do not know much about the politics or history of that part of the world. I do not feel entangled with that part of the world the way I do with Paris, and perhaps that is a moral failing on my part.
To me, it sometimes feels that pain is in the other lane. It is possible for us to be oblivious to it, to ignore it. Until it happens in Paris or New York. Or someplace even closer to home.
Sometimes we confuse our luck with virtue. We are a big and powerful country with a mighty military and lots of intelligence resources. But we cannot pretend we are somehow insulated from the tumult and the chaos, that we can erect a wall to keep out trouble. We are Paris. We are Syria.
I am not naive. I have seen people dead on jailhouse floors. I have talked to men who've murdered children. I hold no illusions about the power of kind words. I know there is no safe place in the world and no way we can keep out all the bad people. I'm not saying we shouldn't try.
But if we are to be the sort of people we pretend to be, we have to be brave enough to open our hearts and borders. We cannot turn away people whose worlds have gone sideways because we are afraid that there may be bad people in their midst. We cannot repeat the mistakes of history. No matter how afraid we are, we must act brave.
No matter how small we feel, we must act like we are big.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/22/2015