Innocent Bystanders

 Today, the 4th Day of Christmas and the Feast of the Holy Innocents, when we remember that, according to the Gospel of Matthew, King Herod murdered all the boys of a certain age in hopes of killing this newborn king of the Jews. 

Aside--It is a little gruesome to have a feast day remembering murdered children, no? 

This historicity of the event is in question. Herod did a lot of cruel things and many are recorded by historians, but nothing is known of this massacre. The defense to this fact is that of all the many terrible things Herod did, this didn't warrant recording. One estimation has the number of boys of the same age in Bethlehem, given the overall population of the town at the time, would have been around a dozen. Imagine being so terrible that killing 12 children falls off the radar.

Anyway, with that out of the way, my reflection on this story goes to the ways that something like a dozen toddlers were murdered while Jesus got away to Egypt. The theodicy of the story would ask why a dozen families couldn't have also had a convincing dream to get out of town. Some might say that these dozen boys were the cost of Jesus staying alive to become savior. 

And following that thought, I'm left with how the good fortune of some comes at terrible cost of others. In modern terms, we often have the benefit of cheap goods because of abusively cheap labor (sometimes by children, to keep to the theme) in far away places. 

Pushing a little bit further, I'm more and more aware of how most of the comforts I enjoy may come at the cost of racist policies, international military interventions, and other political maneuvers that crush people I will never know. 

The holy innocents definitely have modern day parallels. It is an old and current story of power preserving power by violent and oppressive means. 

In fact, it's such a pervasive real-life story, that I wonder if we need to do it in fiction anymore. To some extent, it's so pervasive that even  when a story is not about that overtly, it can still permeate the subtext. I've started investigating, interrogating my own fiction and what lies behind or under some of the characters' lives, things they didn't earn, things that they don't even see. 

I've been saying for years that we need to find new stories to tell. I think that's part of my job as a writer---and I fail at it miserably, but it's there in the back of my head. How can I as a writer reveal another possible world? 

I haven't found a way to tell those stories and I even begin to suspect that I will not find a way to do it in my lifetime. In a recent post, I've said artists can reflect the world as it is and as it could be. I am still in the first category. I don't think it's a wrong or useless category. 

But it's in my mind that I'd like to find my way into the second.