Trending
These days, we need to use caution when confronted with a touching situation.
Touches carry risk and they can cause significant harm. But no touch at all -- that can be the worst of all.
There is touch that is art: a sculpture created by a welder, lines forming circles on paper or in the sand, the touch of sounds made by music.
A skinny Black girl descended from slaves touched a nation with words she spoke. She moved her hands in simple gestures underlining their beauty -- touches written on the air.
But there are people we don't want touching anything.
My cousin Bill was a soldier in World War II. He was awarded three Bronze Stars for heroic and meritorious service in a combat zone. In that zone, Bill was wounded three times. For those touches, they gave him the Purple Heart with two oak leaf clusters.
But they came and broke the windows, anyway, defiled the place he gave so much for.
Bill would not appreciate learning -- and I would dread having to tell him should he come this way again -- that we are fighting the same fight he and all those others fought so many years ago.
There are people, even representatives of We The People, who tried to take away the votes we cast -- votes Bill fought so hard to protect.
They set about doing what should never have been done -- to whom? The vast majority of us whose only political power is our vote. They wanted to take those votes away, votes we cast for candidates and ideas, not for or against each other but with each other, together -- voting our differences.
It's called democracy. It allows us all to touch.
Is their goal to gain control no matter what? Is there someone there who thinks their touch should be the only touch allowed? Or have they been touched by hate?
Either way, we've been down that road before. It was there Bill got wounded all those times; why he carried shrapnel near his spine.
It's like the skinny Black girl said:
"We've seen a force that would shatter our nation rather than share it.
Would destroy our country if it meant delaying democracy
And this effort very nearly succeeded."
***
"When day comes, we ask ourselves, where can we find light in this never-ending shade?"
***
"When day comes, we step out of the shade aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we're brave enough to see it.
If only we're brave enough to be it."
-- Amber Gorman
If only brave enough to touch.
Our country has 4% of the world's population. Our statistically proportionate share of deaths from COVID-19 should be about 80,000 people. We have lost well over 400,000 lives. Many have died alone, without a touch.
Something went very wrong.
My wife is a registered nurse, trained at Toronto General Hospital, a big-city hospital where critical needs are continuous. She learned how to quickly apply needed touch.
She has worked in hospitals, in their trauma units and intensive care units. She became a supervisor and taught other nurses how to touch.
If you worked her shift, best you set your clipboard or computer down; make your notes with one hand, for your other hand isn't there to hold a barrier -- it was there to touch a patient.
Touch heals, my wife says.
People dying of COVID-19 with no family there to touch them -- that makes my tough, smart, battle-tested nurse of a wife weep.
The promise carried in the words that skinny Black girl spoke, those touches she wrote on the air -- they make us cry -- for joy.
Doug Pugh's "Vignettes" runs weekly on Saturdays. He can be reached at pughda@gmail.com.