Читать книгу Peaceful Revolution - Paul K. Chappell - Страница 8

Since my earliest memories, I have been obsessed with war. My father served in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, and when I was young I saw how war can ruin families. I grew up as an only child in Alabama and have fond memories of being three years old and watching my father tend to his garden, feed the birds in our backyard, and chase away a spider that almost frightened me to death. But when I was four, everything changed.

I was sleeping peacefully late one night when I felt someone grab my leg and drag me from my bed onto the floor. My leg was pulled so hard I heard my pajama pants rip down the middle. Looking up and seeing my father, I began to panic as he pulled my hair and told me he was going to kill me. His cursing and my screaming woke my mother, who ran into the room and bear-hugged him until he finally calmed down.

When I was four something else occurred that I could not understand at the time, but that I later attributed to my father’s war experiences. One evening I heard him screaming at my mother and threatening to shoot himself with his pistol. This was the first time I heard him threaten to commit suicide, but it would not be the last. Throughout my childhood, I watched my father lose his grip on reality, and his frightening behavior caused me to struggle with my own sanity. Rage overshadowed his once peaceful nature, and when I heard him complain about violent nightmares, I realized something called war had taken my gentle father from me.

During these early years, I internalized my father’s despair and longed for an escape from his violent behavior. When I was five, this trauma led to my lifelong obsession with war and suffering—when I had a vivid dream that I killed myself. I still remember the dream clearly: I walked through the front door of my house, where I saw both my parents lying dead in coffins. Without thinking, I went to the bathroom cabinet with the intent of stabbing myself in the heart. I opened a drawer and saw a large pair of scissors, but their menacing size frightened me. Next to them, I saw a smaller pair of scissors that my mother used to clip my fingernails. I picked them up, stabbed myself in the chest, and watched as blood covered my hands. Then I walked to my mother’s coffin and laid in it with her, where I waited to die so that my anguish would finally end.

When I woke from this dream I was never the same. I realized life was painful and cruel in incomprehensible ways. I had not asked to be born, and I had not chosen to live in these terrifying surroundings. I felt trapped in a prison of helplessness, and my only crime was being born human.

I am not the only one guilty of this crime. As I grew older, I saw that my agony was not unique in the world, for we all suffer as human beings. At times we all feel that life is painful and cruel beyond comprehension. None of us asked to be born nor were any of us allowed to pick our genes or country of birth. Babies are not given the option of selecting the shape of their face, color of their skin, or parents’ financial standing. Yet here we are, breathing, thinking, living, and vulnerable to so much pain. We have to do the best with what we have.

During these years, I realized life was full of anguish, but as I was lying in bed late one night a new thought crept into my mind. What if I could escape the prison of my helplessness and overcome my suffering? What if I could heal myself and transform my life into a joyful celebration? As I pondered this possibility, I developed an obsession with pain and its cause. I became determined to discover if happiness was real or just an illusion to be futilely chased. I remembered being happy before my father’s violence had transformed me. If I tried to overcome my suffering, couldn’t I gradually experience the warmth of happiness again?

As a child I did not yet possess the intellectual capacity necessary to answer these questions, but a seed within me sprouted and grew stronger over the years. It kept me alive long enough to find solutions to our human problems. That seed was hope.

For many years I thought the hope within me had died. Children’s minds are fragile and unable to cope with trauma; violence inflicted on them has lasting consequences. Growing up not just as an only child in a violent home, but also experiencing racism as a small boy suppressed my hope for a brighter future. Yet as long as we are alive, the possibility of hope lives within us.

Today hope has become a cliché. We must transcend this cliché, because realistic hope is one of our strongest allies in the struggle to solve our personal, national, and global problems. To harness the power of hope we must explore and understand what it really is. We must recognize that hope is a form of trust. And like trust, hope is not easily gained.

To create the realistic hope that strengthens us during times of adversity, we must increase our understanding. When people lack vital information about the world and what it means to be human, they lack hope. The absence of hope, like losing the ground beneath our feet, causes us to fall into the pit of cynicism, bitterness, and helplessness.

I was born human, but only when I began to understand what it means to be human did I realize that life, no matter how painful, is not a prison sentence to be spent behind bars of helplessness and anguish. Hope taught me life is a gift, and in these pages I will share the experiences and ideas that gradually led me to this awareness.

My experiences as a child in Alabama, a student at West Point, and a soldier in the army taught me being born human is not enough. If we are to survive and prosper in the twenty-first century, we must also explore what it means to be human. When we wipe away the myths preventing us from knowing who we truly are, we will see why there is so much reason for hope during these times of great challenge.