The definition of mixed feelings.
Watching your mother-in-law drive off a cliff.
In your new Lexus.
It's crossed my mind in the last few days that, in addition to all the more overt and obvious emotions and feelings being laid bare by the devastation in Japan, there, likely, lurks a sense of the aforementioned mixed feelings amongst, at least, a small segment of the global population.
Say, people born between 1920 and 1940.
What must it be like, I've pondered, to be seeing and hearing all the sights and sounds of the terrible damage and loss that the Japanese people have suffered, not to mention the ongoing danger of a potentially horrific nuclear event and have been alive and aware during a time in our history when the mere word "Japanese" was enough to invoke in us absolutely guilt free desires to destroy that land and those people for whom we now feel such empathy and sorrow?
The dust that blankets the pages of history texts creates an illusory atmosphere, putting a buffer, so to speak, between the dry, printed facts of past events and the raw human emotions that those events evoked.
Put simply, it's one thing to read today about, for example, Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.
It's another to try and grasp the concept that on that day, in that place, the emotions and feelings that resulted from the dropping of bombs on our ships and sailors by pilots of the Empire of Japan were no less passionate and anguished than those resulting from the destruction of the twin towers and the assault on the Pentagon, some sixty years later, on September 11, 2001.
Anyone alive today who was born after 1950 likely still harbors an understandable resentment, even hatred, toward those responsible for flying those airliners into our sense of well being.
At the same time, those very same people are likely wringing both hands and heartstrings and digging deep to donate time, materials and/or money to, in some way, contribute to the recovery of that nation in the Pacific so violently stricken.
Never making the connection, let alone wrestling, however discreetly, with the irony.
That had the earthquake that occurred last week on that Asian island occurred, instead, in 1942, the cries of joy and celebration would have reverberated from the Golden Gate to the Brooklyn Bridge, a clapping of hands and pounding of feet and cheering of voice so profound that it might even have put our own continent at risk for a tremor on a par with last week's seismic shift.
Sadness? Compassion? Humanitarian outreach?
It would have been good riddance to bad rubbish.
The simplistic punchline to all of this philosophical babble is, of course, time marches on.
Time heals all wounds.
Today's enemies can often become tomorrow's friends.
A more subtle moral to the story has flickered in my mind's eye once or twice this past week.
Perhaps it's that if there is any spiritual conclusion to be drawn from such a cataclysmic episode, it is, simply, that there is a message to be found amongst the rubble.
That hatred of any kind, regardless of it's origin, be it racial prejudice, political affiliation, religious difference, sexual preference or any of the other dozens of rationalized justifications we mortal fools create is, first and most obviously, the most profound of human failings and that which we should do our superhuman best to eradicate, by any means necessary, if at all possible, at all times.
But, even more essentially, because it is an unconscionable waste of the time we are given in this life.
If, for no other reason, because of what history has taught, and continues to teach, us.
That those we hate today can so often become our friends tomorrow.
Just ask anyone born between 1920 and 1940.
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