Only More So

And then the thunder, the sky itself so loud and crazy it was unnatural, unreasonable. The ferocious thunderclaps were overwhelming and terrifying. This can’t be right, I thought. Suppose it becomes louder, suppose I become even more afraid. My parents and grandfather and aunts who were gathered with me at the porch door seemed so puny to me as we stood there. The yellow porch light was on and it was pitiful and dim as the lightning flashed, always followed by another universe-rattling boom of thunder, making me quake. My mind tried to say, it’s just a storm only more so. But that was puny too. And all those adults with me---it was as though we were all lost in the same threatening night and they were just as vulnerable to the menace as I was. This was brute power---or sacred power---coming from above, from the sky itself.

Now I see what a luxury it was to be so mildly initiated into terror by Nature rather than by other humans---a frenzied storm instead of bombs, rockets, grenades, assault weapons, mines in the field, machetes, soldiers knocking down the door, hordes of killers. The Old Testament says that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom---but maybe it's only the beginning. What about the ultimate crap-shoot of the whims of Central Casting? What about placing a child in Nanking in 1937 or a Warsaw ghetto in 1943 (or Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Darfur, Gaza, etc.), or in the KKK-ridden deep south in the early 1930s, an easily frightened little boy, but thoroughly white?