Soul Food

Michele Marr

o7 “It’s utterly impossible for me to build my life on a foundation

of chaos, suffering and death. I see the world being slowly transformed

into a wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will

destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up

at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better,

that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquillitf7 yo7 will

return once more.”f7 -- Anne Frank, July 15, 1944

It’s easy to think of today’s children as the first to have to learn

the hard truths of the larger world far too early. I wonder how much of

this is social amnesia and myth.

From child-snatchings and molestations, from sexual predators on the

Internet to school shootings, from husband/fathers slaughtering

wife/mothers and mothers killing their children, we work hard to protect

our children from the grittier aspects of life.

But it wasn’t so long ago that, even in these United States, child

labor was mean and rampant. And so was child abandonment.

Orphans lived on the streets of large cities in large numbers. They

fell prey to thugs and pimps. Programs developed to take them off the

streets and sent them to the still developing West for “better” lives

that were, in reality, often simply indentured servitude.

Children of this century have grown up through two world wars, and two

lesser ones -- though not on our soil. Many weathered the Great

Depression, the dust bowl and tasted the grapes of wrath.

Within recent memory, children saw the world with new eyes through the

Cuban Missile Crisis and the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy

and Martin Luther King.

All over the country children survive floods and fires, hurricanes,

tornados and earthquakes. Nature does not rate her wrath PG, PG-13, R or

NC-17. All her productions are for general audiences. All ages are

admitted.

Innocence lost is an old story. Not a new one. But it has a timeless

power to make us grieve. We grieve for the children we were and we grieve

for our children now.

In the aftermath of what happened on Sept. 11, many of our children

will never be the same. Their world has been altered in ways they will

long struggle to understand.

When I spoke to my sister a few days after the terrorist attacks she

told me a story about her 12-year-old son, Remy. The evening after the

attack, he watched rescue workers struggle to find survivors among the

rubble of the World Trade Center. He realized how many of those who had

tried to save others were, themselves, lost.

The next morning he came downstairs with $40 he had saved. He asked

his mother, father and his 17-year-old sister Kellen to match his funds

and to help him find a way to get the money to the firemen’s families.

It made me cry. But it also made me grateful. I am grateful that Remy,

for now, is safe in a suburb outside Detroit. I remember so well reading

the Diary of Anne Frank, a young girl scarcely older than Remy is now.

The horror that Remy has seen this month only begins to touch the edge

of the terror that Anne saw. Anne, who never lost hope.

When I talked to my sister again last week, she told me a story about

her daughter. A Kellanism. Kellen is a smart girl. A creative girl. A

girl of dreams. A girl with a sense of humor. She graduated from an

academically tough high school with highest honors, but she has a way,

sometimes, of looking right past the obvious.

Kellen, who just started her first year at Eastern Michigan

University, came home one afternoon to share her most exciting lesson of

the day. “Mom, Dad,” she asked, “did you know that if you are in a

building with more than one floor and you are looking for, say, room 304,

it will be on the third floor?”

Kellen had been circling the first floor of a building, searching for

room 304. Room numbers would get higher and higher, and then she would be

back where she started. So, she said, she finally asked someone if they

knew where the room was. “Well, that,” she said they told her, “that

would be on the third floor.”

It’s going to be a whole new year of learning experiences. Kellen, a

vegan, is working at a diner called Coney Island. Frankfurters and other

meat stuffs are the heart of the menu at this diner in the heart of meat

packing country.

Employees get free meals, but to eat, Kellen has to get pretty

creative with hers. Early on in the job, she found a fast friend in a

cook named Alex.

Alex would fix her anything to help her keep her eating ethics. He had

his own, so he understood.

On Saturday when Kellen went to work, Alex wasn’t there. Alex worked

15-hour days, 6 days a week. Alex was always there. She asked where he

was.

Dead, she was told. Alex, Ali Almansoop, a Yemeni Arab had been shot

and killed in nearby Dearborn. His girlfriend’s former boyfriend shot

him, but the shooting is suspected of being a hate-crime. Witnesses say

Alex was on his knees, pleading for his life.

Kellen is heartbroken.

I am prayerful. I pray that the inhumanity our children see in the

coming months never equals in proportion to the inhumanity that young

Anne Frank saw. And I pray, if it does, that they, like Anne, will

somehow never lose hope.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer and graphic designer from

Huntington Beach. She has been interested in religion and ethics for as

long as she can remember. She can be reached at o7

michele@soulfoodfiles.com.f7