More Than a White Ribbon ....

More Than a White Ribbon

“I fell into the door,” she said to me in an apologetic voice.  It was as if she was telling me she was clumsy.  But I was young then and hadn’t yet developed the ability to assess situations quickly enough.  It is most likely that her admission of falling into a door was at least half true.  She probably was punched in the face and then fell into the door, thus the black eye she was painfully sporting as I spoke with her. 

I remember driving out to her house in the middle of nowhere on a beautiful sunny summer day.  For some reason, it was a case when I was selling a bird and also delivering it, which I rarely do.   To this day, I can’t even remember which North Country back road even led me to the ramshackle house where she lived.  The man was more interested in the bird in the cage than she was.  She kept a quiet distance behind him as if she was a shadow – attached, and yet somehow removed.  He squatted down and talked to the bird in a friendly fashion and invited me to step into their kitchen.  There was no kitchen counter.  A stark piece of plywood covered the place where a counter would have been.  Actually, the whole room looked pretty torn-up.

I said something polite about how we all have our own home projects and left it at that.  In retrospect, I wonder how long that project had been in-the-works.  Perhaps the money he spent elsewhere had been earmarked for a counter top?  Maybe even his purchase of this bird was delaying a new counter top he had promised the woman?  I don’t want to think about it.

But that’s how abuse is.  We don’t want to think about it.  Whether we are a victim or an innocent bystander, we’d rather not acknowledge how terrible it is.  We’d rather call it something else, like an “accident” perhaps.  In fact, some people will go so far as to take the blame on themselves in order to protect the perpetrator, “I’m so clumsy, I should have been more careful,” or “I guess I shouldn’t have said what I said to him…”

There are few things which make me as sad as looking at broken, dysfunctional relationships.  Maybe that is because I have this mental construct in my mind of how things should be.  Happiness and living in peace doesn’t have to be a longed-for miracle:  it requires a decision from both participants to not make it tough, to not be self-centered, and to choose to be kind in all things.  It also requires that people deal with their own junk before dragging someone else into their life.  Frankly, it’s going to take more than a bunch of people wearing “white ribbons against domestic violence” to solve this problem – but awareness is a beginning.  Maybe then we can help some of the victims before they actually become casualties.  It’s odd how we read more in the papers about rescuing dogs than we do about rescuing humans.

A few weeks ago, I walked up a side street in the city and noticed a small dachshund mix dog hovering on the driveway of its house.  I say “hovering” because it didn’t seem to be quite 4-on-the-floor as the dogs at my place.  (well, mostly they are 4-on-the-floor, except when they are in mid-air jumping with joy).  I was at an eight-foot distance and just bent ever so slightly and used my doggie-soothing voice to say, “Hi there, and how are you?”  The dog gave me a wary look and raised one paw shakily in the air.  I noticed there was a dirty scrap of carpet or material that it was on, but no food or water was in sight.  It also did not seem to be tethered to anything.  Nonetheless, it gave off a vibe of suffering.  Its ribs were plainly visible and there was not a glint of happiness in its eyes.

I stepped into a home up the street where my friends were and borrowed a cell phone to call the police at 911.  No car came by in the 30 minutes that I lingered to see how it would go.  Friends reported to me that they later heard the dog howling.  The next day, I phoned the 911 call center to see if any action had been taken.  The officer read me a report that was inconclusive.  It never said if they even saw a dog.  It was not clear if they even walked the sidewalk for a closer look.  I assured him that in the future I would not call them and bother them with such a request – I will call the SPCA directly.   He agreed that was a better choice.  WELL, if it is a better choice TODAY, why didn’t you direct me to make the call YESTERDAY?!  

I get it that Police have bigger fish to fry than dog cruelty cases.  Yet I can’t imagine that I am the only person who has ever called 911 on something like this, so why wasn’t the call re-directed to help a resolution come to pass?  I believe that stream-lining the system to a channel that works immediately would be an obvious work-around to any call volume issues:  Type A calls go here; Type X calls go there; etc.  I don’t know, maybe I am a pioneer in my thinking, but I doubt it.  I know they transferred me to a non-emergency line, but I felt more like a postcard that got dumped in the dead letter office:  confident I’m going nowhere, ever.

This was much like the call I made a few years ago when someone’s little terrier was in the middle of 5 o’clock traffic on a busy hill leaving the area where I work.  The dog was in an absolute panic and cars were rolling and stopping so that no one would hit him as he scurried in and out of the center of the road.  To me, that would merit a patrol car coming out to rectify that scenario.  Again, the non-emergent 911 operator was a little more casual about the report.  Maddening.  I imagine other drivers, like me, were hesitant to completely stop traffic, get out of their vehicles and try to corral the dog somewhere else.   

So what is my point with these stories?  I guess that as I grow more mature in my “take” on life’s vignettes, I think we should be more aware of our surroundings.  One of the words we use to describe life as an adult is “Responsibility.”  If you break that word down to “response-ability,” it tells us exactly what the goal of personal maturity is: to get to a point where we have an ability to respond to what is in front of us.  The opposite is the mental stupor that is induced by living in a way that is completely self-absorbed and leisure-oriented.  We are so busy living for ourselves at times, that we forget our place as a member of the community of life around us.

We need response-ability for our interfaces with both people and animals – in fact, all of the facets of life surrounding us require our presence of mind.  I guess the harder task will be to ferret-out the things that dehumanize our perspective in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.  Godspeed to us.  We’ve got a ways to go. 

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