This is it

8. Day Twelve

People look at me askance when I say how much I love Michael Jackson’s music. Except my husband who feels exactly the same. And now my son is in love with him too. He probably would never have bothered to listen to him had he not upped and died.

We went to see “This is it” on Halloween. Very fitting, I thought. There is something spooky about MJ’s story. And the remake of Thriller was perfect too. But the line that I took with me out of the cinema and back home was when he said “I just love the earth”. The man is not just a tragic figure, a product of our sickened society practically born in a limousine, unable to go shopping without closing the shop down but totally fixated on materialism. He was also someone really genuine, truly honest, very simple. He let them destroy his face in order to be beautiful and ended up looking only gruesome. But he really really would have done anything he could have, anything at all, to save the world.

Now I can identify with that. Saving the world and all that jazz. Right up my street. Yet at the same time I often look around, especially at crowded airports, and think: I wish we humans would all just go away. We are like vermin filling up every available space on this earth with the things we want. Like my kid’s wish list that has everything in the 2009 Lego catalogue on it, we want everything and we want it now. Another motorway to get to work quicker, another car to drive the kids to their play-dates on the other side of town, another house because the other one had the wrong neighbours, another computer with broadband, blu-ray instead of DVD, bargains galore, gadgets, touch-screen mobile phones that get you quicker onto Facebook, more Tweets per screen.

Underneath it all is the earth. Crammed fuller than my son’s wardrobe. Need some more space? Rip up another rain forest. Have a hamburger but don’t think about what you’re eating in case it chokes you. Climate change is earth’s sweet revenge on mankind. Now we won’t have to fly south to get sunburn. Only trouble is the polar bears. Wiping them out seems a high price to pay, but then we still have Knut only a bus ride away. Yeah and a couple of those very flat islands will have to go, but since we have to stop flying so much we won’t be visiting them anyway. In any case I am rather fond of mountains and some of them might even still have snow on them.

Soon we will be tired of all the complaining about the environment and turn back to the big screen to watch death and destruction or maybe play Modern Warfare II for a while. It is, after all, our forte. Killing. But even in this day of drones and virtual Eyes in the Sky piloted by men 7000 miles away, shooting at images on a screen like the video games the kids eat for breakfast, atrocities are still being committed in the name of freedom and democracy. Only the numbers are not so mind-boggling as they once were. And yet one single life of the people living in the same land as our enemies should be worth at least the same as an unborn embryo, surely? Pro-life? Or only pro American life? Not even that, if you take capital punishment into account. Who is to decide which life is sacrosanct and which isn’t? The grounded pilot at his screen in the Nevada desert shooting at “hot guns” in Afghanistan?

Anyway, I think I got the point at last. It came to me after watching “This is it”. I care too much about the world. My empathy is such that I have internalised all the pain. I am suffering along with the world, the earth. It is easy to understand why MJ took painkillers. It hurts to look, but some of us just can’t look away. And the feeling of responsibility, of being a part of the problem, means that it isn’t possible to just drop out either. To just go and live by the ocean and watch the waves, or on top of a hill with a view of the forest and grow your own vegetables. Or in Neverland. I too would die of loneliness.

There is no other choice but to try and change the world and save it from further destruction by the incredibly stupid or unbelievably greedy. That description covers a good two-thirds of us (not including you, of course). Resignation is not an option, that would mean the pathogens would win.

When I at last allowed myself the luxury of having a child, I let the whole world in. My defences were dropped and I made myself vulnerable. In order to love someone as much as a mother loves a child the dangers around me became personal. He could die any time and it would kill me. No, it would be worse than that, an agony that defies description, living with that kind of loss. The birth of my son meant living in fear that he would be taken away again. We are no longer talking about wars that happen to other people, or reckoning up the millions of dead after a nuclear holocaust. We are talking about me and my love (how selfish). Too much to bear even thinking about but true to type I think about it.

We have to save the world because I can’t bear to tell my son that we didn’t and he will have to live with the mess we made. Even now I hear the youth telling us that it is our fault. Well it is and I know, but I just don’t know if we can really do anything about it. Even though every word that I breathe says the opposite and people ring me and mail me to ask what we should do. Write a letter, join a flashmob, start a Facebook cause, tell your friends and while you’re at it, tell your enemies. Recycle, shop at the food co-op, eat organic food, ride a bicycle. Be good, be careful, remember the date.

At the end of the day the beauty of life is really in the moment, however kitsch that sounds. Not in a possibly unattainable future. Every tiny victory is worth celebrating because it might be the last one. If you wait to see what the outcome will be before having the party, you might never have a party. Better get on with it. Even the rehearsal could be as much fun as the show itself – this is it.