One Grain at a Time

Have you ever held a single dry soybean in your hand? What do you think it weighs: one gram? Imagine holding a soybean in your palm and see if you can get a sense of the weight of it. It’s very, very light – hardly noticeable. And yet, this year, somewhere in the Midwest, it is very likely that someone will probably die from the weight of soybeans.

At a grain silo, grain in the silo drains into several openings in the floor, then into an underground tunnel and onto a conveyor belt. The grain occasionally will hang up and not flow through those openings. When it hangs up, too often someone will enter the silo to move the grain. And too often, that someone will not make it out of the grain silo alive. It is too common an occurrence. Sometimes the person who enters the silo places their face too close to the grain, where there is a layer of carbon dioxide and they die from a lack of oxygen, but just as often the person suffocates by an avalanche of the grain inside. One tiny grain is very light, but when a man is under thousands of grains, they can take his life.

I don’t know what it’s like to suffer such a fate and I would not compare anything I’ve experienced to the suffering of the families of such a farmer, but I will say I know what it’s like to have thousands and thousands of tiny weights lying on top of me until I can hardly breathe. Every day tiny infractions of our rights as citizens, every human right and civil liberty that is violated, stack on us like so much grain, unnoticed and unimportant at first, until it is too late.

Today the news media reported that a deal has been struck for sharing oil revenue in all of the Iraqi provinces equally. This is good news, right? I should feel relieved, right? But then I found out that the dark side of the story went mostly unreported. It seems that big oil companies are being given absolute control over Iraqi oil, and it feels like another grain has fallen on top of me. A federal appeals court said it was fine to indefinitely hold prisoners without charge. “Tic,” goes the sound of one tiny grain striking my arm. Dick Cheney is saber-rattling with Iran. Tic. The Bush Administration continues to spy on us. Tic, tic, tic.

The horrible thing about imagining oneself suffocated in a grain bin is that you observe the phenomenon from within the tragedy. This is not like sitting in your car and watching a careening truck coming your way. You have no sense of dispassionate detachment. You are inside the tragedy as it happens grain by grain. As a citizen, I sit within the US and watch this imperial presidency implode upon itself and there is nothing I can do about it. Tic, tic, tic go the grains and I just can’t seem to get ahead of them. Soon their weight is alarming, but by the time I realize this, it’s almost too late.

All we can do is struggle. We must struggle for the oxygen of freedom, for overcoming the weight that besets us. We must struggle against imperialism and hubris; against the military-industrial complex. We must struggle against violations of human rights and civil liberties wherever they occur. If we do not struggle, then one grain at a time, we will be overcome. Struggle on!