Some of the things I have been reading and looking at this morning brings to mind the most famous Anne Frank quote, written only a couple of days before her family was captured:
“I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are really good at heart.”
What IS that? What do you CALL that kind of hope, faith, belief? Well. I call it God. That, to me, IS God. An actual manifestation of Him, or It, or whatever. The force for good in the universe, which can never be extinguished. Never.
I don’t have the faith that Anne Frank had. My psychology tends towards doom and gloom. Her diary makes me want to fall to my knees in awe. And humility.
In the play made of her diary, Otto Frank is given her diary at the end. Long after the war is over. Everyone in that house had died, except for him. As is easy to imagine, he was a completely shattered man. In the last scene of the play, the epilogue, he reads sections of her diary. And he reads that one line: “I still believe, in spite of everything,that people are really good at heart.”
He tries to take it in. It is hard to take in. And then he says, simply, “She puts me to shame.”
I think about the casual selflessness of the Marines, and that is what I feel. They put me to shame.
I sit here in my warm apartment, drinking coffee. I am going to go do my play tonight. And then go out afterwards, and have a drink with my parents. Talk about the play. Tomorrow morning, I am meeting my parents for breakfast in the city, before they take off for Maine. The weekend after the show closes, I am going to take a bus home to Rhode Island. Visit with my dear high school friends, hang out with my parents, talk with them, eat with them, take a walk around the block, looking at spring budding all around me.
I get to do all of this, because those people are sacrificing everything over in Iraq. They have given up the comforts of home, they have left their parents, their girlfriends,their wives behind. They sleep in cots in the middle of a desert.
I honestly do not know how to thank them.
