When Everything Sounds Like A Scream

The World Is Moaning In Pain, Can You Hear It?

Soldier Medic, Send Me, Sir!

Believe it or not, when I was a young dummy, I wanted to join the Zapatistas. The Zapatistas, for those not in the know, were a rebel band of Indigenous people in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Led by a masked man named Sub Commander Marcos, their guerrilla fighters of men and women filed out of the jungle-covered mountains one day like leopards and took over the town of San Cristobal de las Casas.

They took over the police station and, in a stunning move that embraced emerging technology at the time, they sent faxes to news organizations around the world, announcing their plan to free the peasant class in Mexico and upend an oppressive system that had immiserated their people since Cortez had arrived on their shores. They wanted to redistribute land. They wanted healthcare for their children who were dying of preventable illnesses like diarrhea and parasites, and they wanted local leadership that was autonomous from Federal Mexican rule.

I went down to Chiapas and tried to join up! I asked around, but nobody seemed to be interested. A hotel owner told me to go somewhere to meet some folks and so I did. I sat in the zocalo in the town center at the impossible hour of 6AM, but nobody came to meet me. It was like those kung fu movies where the disciple tries to meet the master, only to be turned away. To prove his determination, he returns, over and over again until he is finally taken in. Not me. I gave up immediately. Somewhere, deep in my not-yet-developed brain, I understood that I had little to offer and much to lose. I would have been a liability to the Zapatistas and myself. They probably knew that too.

I wound up traveling around, hitchhiking throughout Mexico instead. I found a drag bar on a mountaintop. I saw families that lived in hammocks under thatched-roof palapas. I met travelers who harvested wild psilocybin mushrooms and tripped all day. And I met a hippy, as I often did on my travels back then. This man, whose name I forget, had been wandering since the ‘60s. As a Gen Xer, I had an uneasy relationship with hippies. I felt that I was more punk rock. There was a generational fork in the road: One way led to peace & love, the other to rage and disillusionment. Where these two roads diverged, I had taken the latter, and I was convinced that made all the difference.

The hippy and I hiked around in the jungle one afternoon. We heard a series of loud cracking noises that cut through the forest. I was convinced these were gunshots. At the time, I was a medic in the Army National Guard. I had fired many, many rounds downrange, so I was not naive about the sound of a firearm. These cracks sounded to me like high-velocity rounds. I expounded on this as we walked. Perhaps the Zapatistas were training!

Eventually we came to a river at the bottom of a small canyon. Down below, women were washing their clothes in the water. They slapped the fabric against flat stones in the water. Crack! Crack! Crack! The hippy laughed. My face turned red. The gunshots were just the domestic sounds of hardworking women.

We kept walking until we were past them and then took a rest. The hippy took out a plastic magnifying glass and tried to use the concentrated rays of the sun to light up a bowl of weed. Every time he tried, a cloud moved in front of the sun, and the light dimmed. After a few minutes, he gave up and produced a lighter. His plan for a “natural” ignition was foiled, and he sparked a Bic until he was drawing deep lungfuls of smoke.

I was already clean then, so I did not smoke weed with him. After a few tokes, he lay back and looked at the sky. “If you look at that cloud, you can see a tail, and some wings. It’s a dragon, see?” I grunted in reply. “That tree looks like an old man. See the mossy beard?” As he did his hippy shapes-in-nature crap I felt a spiritual smirk begin to curl inside my soul.

Years before, when I was getting high, I would huff lungfuls of Ethan Allen Furniture spot remover until I heard helicopters pounding the air overhead. Violent sounds, ripping through me. When I was in Army training, I loved getting into helicopters. When they landed, the rotor wash whipped the air and threw debris around us on the ground like flakes in a shaken up snowglobe. The sound was overwhelming. It was an industrial scream, full-throated, that articulated the rage I felt inside about the world.

Witnessing the world from a place of inchoate fury, like the scream over discordant guitars in a punk song, felt more real to me than the saccharine melodies of hippy folk rock. My view was jaundiced by the world I grew up in. Our clouds were filled with acid rain that was destroying forests in the Midwest and dropping mercury into our lakes.

Those women behind us, in the river, were living in a type of poverty that should have shamed the entire industrial world. The feeble swap of a plastic magnifier for a bic lighter was the compromise the world was making for a high that told us we were gentle people, even in a jungle filled with revolution that our government wanted to crush.

Over the years, my self-righteousness revealed itself to be as futile as a Peter, Paul, and Mary song sung at a protest. Life humbled me, as it does us all. I am now far more aware of my powerlessness to change the world, my part in its problems, and the various Bic lighters I pull out instead of sticking with whatever solution I vowed to enact. Such is life. We’re all compromised. And the hippy wasn’t entirely wrong. There is poetry in nature. But I wasn’t wrong either, there are also screams and gunfire. It’s all true and it’s all a lie. Holding heaven and the world together in their totality is like trying to collect all the laundry from the dryer without a bag. A sock falls. Some underwear hits the floor. You stoop down to gather them back up, and then your shorts and t-shirt slip through and hit the laundry room floor. My arrogance wasn’t thinking I knew better than that hippy, my arrogance was thinking I, or anyone, could truly grasp the nature of this world.

I write this all because I am visiting someone very dear to me. She is unwell, and it hurts me more than I can say to see her in pain. She is scared. I am scared. As I lie in bed after a visit, hoping another day will show improvement, a noise from a mini-fridge in my room keeps distracting me. It is not a loud noise. It is a small sound that comes from a motor that needs oil, I think. But to my ears, alert to the pain in the world, the tiny whine is a distant scream, obscured by walls and carpets.

“Who is that screaming? Who is that in so much anguish?” My mind keeps asking me. And then my eyes land on the fridge. The sound I keep hearing is not a far-off cry of pain. It is me.