Bones that Speak

“Hard to see, the dark side is.” –Master Yoda

My fiance’s parents were visiting last night. We all piled into the car and drove from Roxbury to the posh South End for dinner. On the way, I noticed a huge, unmarked building that I had never seen before. I asked my fiance what it was and he said it was a chemical weapons facility built by Boston University.

Huh? Why? Why would they do that?

I looked it up this morning on the web. It’s a research facility, not a chemical weapons factory as my fiance said, but isn’t it? Boston University said that the facility was built to save lives. Whose lives are they talking about saving? When did ebola become rampant in Boston? Come on! They are not researching the deadliest viruses known to mankind to help save us from them. Oh, give me a break. BU’s own professors denounced the building of this death lab.

But built it got. Its facade looks normal enough, but upon further inspection appears faceless. A faceless building. How appropriate. I can’t help but wonder how they entice people to work in such a den of wickedness. It is nothing less than the allure of the dark side of the Force. We have seen it played out in Hollywood, men in dark cloaks happening upon innocents, catching them off guard, playing on their fears. Everyone in the audience recognizes the bad guys, but the innocents take the bait.

Right and wrong seem so obvious in the movies, but in the real world, it goes a little something like this: students come out of college where many have their inner-wisdom squashed. They weigh heavily with student loans. They are afraid of the burden of their debt. They’ve heard horrible stories. They are afraid of being poor, which in our culture is equated to being a failure. Someone recruits them at a bio-chemical lab for a good salary. The student is told that they will be doing something positive. They walk past the protestors with their heads low. With this job, they can bring their family to America. They can give their sick brother health insurance. They can really get somewhere in their career. They can finally move out of the cramped apartment they share with five other room-mates and a family of mice. They are told only what they need to know. The same is true at every level of corporate and government hierarchy: knowledge is given on a need to know basis. And who knows what’s really going on? Only a select few, and we will never know their names. They are the faceless ones.

These are dangerous times, indeed, because we seem to have forgotten that there are worse things in life than being poor.  What’s the worst that can happen if we don’t take that job? That job that we think will save us, save our families, save our futures. Well, I guess the worse that can happen is that we can die. Our family will die. But maybe it’s better to die this way than to live with the knowledge that we are the creators of death.

As humans, it is a dangerous thing to not know what we are willing to die for (Malidoma Some). It is a dangerous thing to have millions of people who are not willing to die for anything. That’s how these companies get so out of control with greed. Of course, in this Yin era that we are in, choosing between right and wrong is not always easy. Unlike in the Yang era out of which we transitioned several years ago, there are no clearly marked boundaries. It means that corruption is everywhere, but so too is goodness (Makarta). So, while universities do good things, they have also become corrupt corporations.

LUKE: How am I to know the good side from the bad?

YODA: You will know. When you are calm, at peace. Passive.

I would not be surprised to find out that the pharmaceutical companies are in cahoots with the death lab, who are in cahoots with the universities, who are in cahoots with politicians. This is what I predict, either in Boston or elsewhere, and goddesses, please let me be wrong: many thousands of deaths will occur, both here and abroad. In a few years, voila, a drug or series of drugs will appear that allow you to live a relatively normal life with ebola, or whatever, with a few so-called side-effects that may include dry mouth, increase risk of suicide and/or a sudden, forceful ballooning of the buttocks. Billboards of happily married ebola-infected couples with pretty children will dot the freeways. Commercials and advertisements everywhere will boast “Proud to be an Ebola Survivor.” We’ll give it a ribbon. We’ll give it a cause. We’ll give it a hot-line. We’ll give it group therapy. But here’s the catch: you will have to take the ebola drugs for the rest of your life. Gotcha! If you’ve managed to avoid debt because of student loans, try getting out of the debt from your ebola medication!

The pattern is so obvious. It’s just that now the governments and corporations are getting really bold. They’re doing it in our own backyard. It will be Guernica right here in Boston.They have even created a term to trivialize any claims against their misdeeds. The conspiracy theorists of today are the witches of old.

This debate between the community and the bio-lab Dungeon of Horrors, has been going on since 2003. I just heard about it yesterday. I drove past the building. It looked like any other modern building, but I grocked a wrongness about it. Call me a witch if you wanna, but I FELT it. I felt it as a disturbance in the Force, no shit.

Now, I will admit, that this old news being new news to me is my own fault. I tend to live under a rock. I hate watching the news because it hurts so much. It hurts it hurts it hurts, but now it seems that I can’t avoid knowing even if I want to because I can feel it in my bones and the bones will speak.

And they will continue to speak. And speak and speak. Even if ebola gets me. The wisdom of the bones cannot be silenced. My bones, your bones and all the bones of beings that seek to nurture life instead of destroying it. ‘Cause dig this all yee Obi Wans: those that seek the dark way of suppressing life have forgotten one very important thing: that some of us will be more powerful in death.