Pure water?

Sunday, June 16, 2013

I always seek water when I feel this way, when I lose faith and struggle against the encroachment of evil – those dark shapes that loom at the edge of my way of life and seek perpetually to devour me.

Sometimes, even those who pretend to be good scare me.

I keep thinking of those scenes from Harry Potter where supposedly good angels suck out the souls of bad, sometimes taking the souls of the innocent.

Lately, however, I have learned how few good guys there are, and how often evil feeds on evil, and hurts good people in their schemes to get ahead.

Growing up near one of the most polluted rivers in American, I learned that life goes on even there, and that those forced to live in that world often have to make bad choices to survive, wildlife feeding on polluted wildlife in order to stay alive, polluted inside and out.

There are signs along some of the rivers that say don’t eat the fish or crabs, as if many poor people have a choice, faced between dying of cancer later or starvation now. For some the polluted water is all they have, and must settle for lust of power rath3er than love of life.

The signs, however, are meant for those of us who delude ourselves into believing we are less polluted than those who openly feed here. Those who are as pure as all that are dangerous, wandering into this world without knowing the rules. They are house fish let loose on the presumption that they can some how survive in a world where big fish eat small, when they have never seen a big fish and have always been hand fed.

The real problem comes with people like me, who have power, and dislike it, who believe in justice and fair play and who – despite being flawed – like our lives with one fundamental belief to never, ever let evil win, even if justice can’t win either.

But I also live by another belief that no river is so polluted that it can never become clean again, and I still retain faith that when it does, I can myself off the filth of this world and become pure again – if no less flawed.