Why?

Dear Eugene,

What is the biggest human tragedy you've heard of?  I know this sounds very much like a rhetorical question to unveil what I think I know but others don't.  But, no, it is not like that.

Maybe let me ask the question again: What is the worst tragedy you've experienced?---but hold there, I am not talking about a single personal experience, or an isolated incident.  I am asking, What is the biggest human tragedy as you experienced it?

In my line of work and various off-work involvements, I talk to people all the time.  And I listen more than I talk.  The question above emerged out of a more positive one--actually, probably the mother of all positive questions: "What is the meaning of life?"

Let me tell you, my dear pastor, a sick joke.  Someone told me this; I have my own varied rendition.  But let me tell you the original...my way.

There was this tough university professor who was handing out the toughest exam in the toughest Philosophy course.  When the students received the exam sheet it felt much lighter than expected in their sweaty palms.  Upon breaking up the seal to accept their fate, they found only one word between the pages...

WHY?

They were reasonably flabbergasted.  Some were at the verge of crying.  Others ready to wet a different part of their being.  Still they scrambled for a fitting way to survive.

One student finished his exam in less than a minute, and eventually got an A for it.

WHY NOT? was his answer.

There was a time I would insist on micromanaging my kids' internet screen time.  That idyllic period has gone and passed.  Maybe I've dreamed it up and it was never there.  They say it is about work, about school, about church.  Yes, pleasure often found a way to fill the void between the humdrum; and who is to dictate it can't go the other way?

My son is always checking out what's on Youtube.  A lot of that has to do with his guitar playing, I understand.  Still, the bending of his little body (this is how a father perceives though he is almost my same height), frowning brow to brow facing the screen, a picture I often see when passing his bedroom door, calls a question out of me: "Son, what are you trying to find?"

And I know his answer will never be: "Well, what else?  The meaning of life, of course, old man!"

Though I think that is his real answer, if he is given a chance to articulate.  The "chance" might administer itself in way of a force, a war, an incapacitating sickness, a profound loss of more profound beauty, a rude awakening to corner a person with necessarily cruel questions one can no longer evade.

Why do we live the way we live?  Why do we stare at screens all the time, as if to peer into a portal where life's meaning can somehow be found?  Why do we eat the way we eat, shop the way we shop, vacation the way we vacation, do business the way we do business, protest the way we protest, relate to others and the earth the way we relate, hold on to religious doctrines and lifestyle as if we were the ones who formulated or lucky enough to stumble upon them and now can retrofit our "answers" that are utterly tone-deaf to questions blowing in the wind?

If our answer to WHY? can only be WHY NOT? then we must get used to living in the unnamed devastation of getting an A from a contemptuous professor, a world of opinion that has never cared two hoots about how we answer as long as we go along with the story in the name of peace and prosperity and convenience, the well-oiled mechanism of don't-ask-don't-tell.

Strange how the big "tragedy" (as how we usually define it) often invokes human's most strenuous search for meaning, a reason to hope, the courage to trust once more, the glory to fall in love all over again.  As if it really can't be that bad after all.  The worst human tragedy, as I experienced it, is the kind that we can't even call it for what it is.

If there is not even a God, I am not quite sure my answer to the sunset should only be a "WHY NOT?"

Yours, Alex