Last night N and I watched Syriana.  Syriana tells the story of Big Oil and Big America working in front of and behind the scenes to make sure America’s oil interests get met exceeded.  It humanizes the many people involved and caught up in this work, including unemployed Pakistani oil workers, CIA operatives, lawyers, business owners, consultants, kings and princes both sympathetic and opposed to America’s hopes for oil in Kazakhstan.

As often happens after movies such as these, I feel a lot of dissonance inside.  I’m troubled, to put it mildly, by the ways that people and entire countries get objectified as companies and countries pursue short-term prosperity (defined fiscally).  I’m equally troubled by the fact that there are no bad guys to pin this on when you look up close, no people that aren’t human like you or me, caught up in systems far bigger than themselves, histories they didn’t choose, but have been socialized within, indoctrinated by.  Put me in a family with history in oil, and I may just care more about my dynasty than the people I have to kill (literally or otherwise) to maintain it.  Who knows?

So I roil inside with indignation that can’t find a home.  I roil with the helplessness I feel when I read about Iraq and Beirut and kidnappings and religious conflicts.  When people blindly support one side or another in such things, one side or another when it comes to politics or war.

What can I do but try to listen to my anger?  Try to listen to whether it’s inviting me to do something different with my days, or inviting me to do what I’m already doing with that much more oomph.  Anger is fuel, I’m thinking, that can take us down many roads.  If it can take me further down my road of bearing light in inner places–a world-changing endeavor just like politics or organizing or war–then bring it on, I guess I say.  It feels terrible, a scribbly sharpness inside, but maybe that’s okay.  Maybe I need it to fuel my acts into ones more alive, more full of courage and the kind of hope that comes from acting in response to what I don’t like (and what I do!), even if my acts address the yuck in a round-about way.

Can writing my novel, my stories, my essays, my blog, raising my baby, loving family and friends, tending my soul–can these make the world more sane?  Can they change foreign policy?  Can they have anything at all to do with who needs and gets oil, how much, and at what human or monetary cost?

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