NAÏVE INNOCENCE

A couple of weeks ago while on a return trip from visiting Arlena’s Mom, we were listening to public radio and a rerun of The Moth Report, a program I had never even knew existed. At any rate, the segment was a talk by Ishmael Beah who came to this country as a teenager after having lost his entire family in the civil war is Sierra Leone and after having been conscripted into being a child soldier in that war.

It was a fascinating account of those first years in this country, in New York City specifically, and about the group of young friends he made while living there. He told about going with them to a big estate in upstate New York and playing a game of paint ball with them. Paint ball is a war game where paint balls are used instead of bullets.

Because he had been a real soldier, he won the game. They never asked him back to play the game again. It was only later on that he felt he could tell them why he was such an expert in war and war games. But at that moment after the “battle”, he could not reveal himself to them. He allowed them to live in what he called their “naïve innocence”.

Those words set me back. Whether we believe it or not, whether we understand it or not, we all live in a world of naïve innocence – our own little world. If we’ve never been to war, real war, we cannot understand what war is like. If we have never had cancer or lost a child or lost a job – the list is endless – we are naively innocent of the realty of each one of these.

Oh, we think we understand, but we do not. We cannot until we have been there, walked that road, felt that pain. What is worse is that we make statements as if we do understand when all we are doing is making fools of ourselves. What we should do is be thankful that we have not had to walk that painful road and pray for those who are walking it at that moment.

Allow me to be a little political: at this moment in time when local elections are upon us and the presidential campaign is in full swing, we are bombarded with advertisements and interviews where the candidates tell us in so many words that they feel our pain. No, they don’t. They’re too rich. I remember years ago when the first President Bush told on himself about going to a grocery store after he was out of office and was shocked by the price of a loaf of bread. Naïve innocence.

I’m picking on politicians because they are so up front in there attestations that they know what we are going through as if they are going through it themselves. But I am also looking into a mirror because I know I am often guilty of doing the same: thinking I understand when I really do not when I should be thankful for my own naïve innocence. The sad part in all of this is that painful issues are only addressed politically and personally when naïve innocence is replaced by reality itself.