A Mother's Son

I was surprised to see that my last message was posted November 1st. I was out of town for a week on a solo trip to the Sierras and ....ooops....that was before Halloween, and therefore not an excuse. Anyway, I have been very busy, so please understand the lapse in attention to the blog. I have probably lost a good number of regular readers because of the apparent abandonment of the blog and the to-be-expected fall-off in interest because of the lack of high drama due to my recovery from the heart and cancer scares.

But the reason for my resumption of the blogging (is that a word?) is personal....it continues to be a means to the end of healing and to the expression of my thoughts about things and events and people and situations.

I booked tickets earlier in the week for the performance of Gustav Mahler's Ninth Symphony....a complex work that is vexing and sublime. Gustav never heard the composition, not because he was deaf, like Beethoven at the latter's debut of his Ninth, but because he died before it could be performed. Prior to booking the tickets I went to YouTube to listen to exerpts of the different movements of the symphony. That way I would know what I was getting for my money.

Anyone who spends anytime cruising the YouTube site knows that there are sometimes hundreds of related videos on a topic. One of the quirks in the presentation of those video choices is that a completely unrelated video will pop up in the scroll column, leading one to wonder what the heck is "that" doing there. While looking at the choices on Mahler I saw a frame with the bloodied head of Moammar Qadaffi while he was still alive. This is how one is led astray and ends up spending hours on YouTube viewing God-knows-what. I went to that video....a cell phone video recorded by one of the anti-Qadaffi rebels in the crowd and saw the last minutes of a brutal dictator's life.

The cheering and jeering crowd of rebels were on Moammar like a pack of terriers on a rat. It was a jarring and a brutal display of utter contempt for a man who had brought a pall of darkness over a country and its people. Dazed and incredulous that he was being treated with blows and jeers instead of some kind of deference to him as the all-powerful leader he thought he still was, Qadaffi kept reaching up to the wound on his head and looking at the blood that covered his hand. Perhaps he was begging for mercy. There was no mercy given. Mockery, slaps, kicks, punches, insults, a pistol to his head, hair grasped to turn his bloody face to a camera....again, a rat at the mercy of a pack of terriers. He was dead shortly after that video was made. It ended with the old fool being dragged off to his fate. There was a glimmer of sympathy in my heart for the man as a victim of such brutality. That was short-lived as I thought of the terror he had used to keep a people and their hopes subdued or denied.

But the reason I write of this is the other videos of the Libyan reality that I viewed that night.

A young man, probably in his early twenties, wearing a striped t-shirt, jeans and sport shoes....husky like a football player...dressed like so many young men around the world....a short tuft of carefully trimmed red beard on his chin...lay on his back, arms upturned as if in surrender, his face looking up at the desert sky.
He was probably handsome, I want to believe that, but the bullet that ripped away his nose and passed through his head made that difficult to determine. He lay dead, executed on the side of a road along with five or six other young men. They were not soldiers. I presume they were rebels or possibly some young men rounded up on the suspicion they were anti-Qadaffi rebels.

The image of that young man haunts me still. I think of my own sons...young men...and know the anguish I would feel if that young man in that desert was one of them. Tears come to my eyes for that young man and for my sons....

.....and tears come to my eyes for a mother far away. A mother who has lost a son.

SRH