Stories Painted with Fire
Rage Bait and the Burning of Empathy
Deep thoughts and long walks have feasted on my time these days.
My mind is engulfed by the flames that feed on change.
This fire in my life has been so all-encompassing that I’ve started looking for new fires to be engulfed by, reaching out to the hurts of others so my pains can go forgotten, if for only a moment.
In general, I don’t like giving my energy to the dry grass most media channels feed the world.
I firmly believe our attention feeds the fire we are seeing now.
The fire loves all the yelling, the crying, the indignation, the righteousness; it laughs and gorges on it all.
I know this, but I still fell for its tricks. My hurts so strong, the only thing to soothe my burns is to focus on the fires burning down houses across the street.
It’s easy to fall into the flames. So bright and warm at first, it feels like sitting out on a nice sunny day. But just like the fire, the sun burns too. Greed warps our minds and pushes us closer to the flame.
It’s easy to see the performances and the narratives being forced on people when peacekeeping has been part of my life for so long.
I’m the oldest in my family. I grew up with teen parents, and noticing tension and the strings that are pulled to invoke a reaction has been something I’ve trained myself to be attuned to.
I’ve made a game of it. I’ll find a national headline, but I won’t read the article yet. First, I’ll find an artist who likes to paint in reds. Then I’ll find another who paints only in blues, and I’ll read them side by side.
The object they paint is exactly the same, but the story they tell could not be more different. One paints in blue, the quiet grief of autonomy lost, the depth of battles fought simply to be heard. The other lives in a world consumed by fire, all slashes and jagged edges, hiding the fears etched deep into their heart.
The game is not to decide which painting is “right.” The objective is to understand why they use their colors to tell such different stories.
I don’t understand how people can’t see that the yelling of correctness only succeeds in fanning the flames of misunderstanding.
I yelled once during an argument with my husband. He called my mom, and she yelled at him, saying, “What did you do to her? She never yells.”
It’s true. I don’t see the point. Instead, I roll up into a ball and wait for the fire to eventually go out. I still burn; scars from those times of being shaken to give a reaction play in my mind.
I just know that once the yelling has started, the ability to hear has been removed.
Yelling does help at times when attention needs to be brought to the hurts or pains in ourselves and others. But yelling will not allow others the time to feel the sadness in the portrait painted blue, or the fears that streak across the portraits that burn red.
The danger is evident. What the yelling and arguing has succeeded in doing is bringing people with the same pains and the same fears together. That highly concentrated energy has started fires in people so vast that only yelling and arguing are allowed to take up space in their minds and in their hearts, drowning out the cooling waters empathy provides.
It could be that I grew up Mexican American in Texas.
One eye tinted in red and the other in blue, easily slipping into the fires kindled by fears and pain.
I can’t pretend to fully comprehend how a person might feel when they do not feel at ease in their body, but I try.
I try to think of how horrible it must feel to look in a mirror and see yourself as wrong, to dislike the very form that keeps a person together. I think of the courage it must take not only to keep feet firmly on the ground, but also to push past the hailstorm of expectations when your heart decides it will take the road still consumed with shadows.
I feel for the parents who once held their baby to their chest, dreaming of giving them all they want and need, only to have that dream walk into the fire. The fear they must feel to have their hearts so exposed to pain.
What would it be like to love someone so deeply and be told that the purity that shines in your heart for another human being is not only wrong, but foul?
I feel for the voiceless voices that had to climb mountains to speak their truth, a truth that won them access to their bodies. Bodies and voices so strong that fear buried them deep into caskets so that only the ghosts of their spirits roamed the earth.
I have fought my own battles to have my truth heard, to keep my voice from disappearing. The fear of its being taken still burns in my throat.
I also know the pain of looking into my reflection and it bringing me to tears. Mirrors quickly replaced by numbers that shined in fluorescent lights at my feet. The battles hard-won over years to unearth the woman buried by fear and doubt.
I know my pains are not the same as all these stories painted in blue, but in trying to connect my hurts to theirs, it allows me to see why their painters favor the watery colors of the ocean.
I feel for anyone that has their body taken from them, choices being stripped one by one. Hard-earned wars won simply to be whole, reduced to ash by people who do not understand the fires they burned due to hurts of the past, a clearing of the old to make room for their future.
I can see it: the fear that the fire will burn them back into submission, tearing down the fragile structures they worked so hard to build, their sovereignty whittled down to uniform logs that once reached deep into the earth and far into the sky.
I can see why they feed the fire.
I can also see that their sovereignty, their choices to paint in blue, can burn down the foundations of homes built on hymns and history.
The stories told from birth to childhood and into adulthood, stories that weave the very fiber of their lives.
The stories that create a perfect circle of fear.
Where is the devil located? In hell.
Where is hell? Right where the fires burn at the center of the earth, right below our feet.
Should we go digging for the devil? Never.
What is the best way to keep from visiting the devil’s home? We must not dig.
These teachings start from very early ages. I remember dropping a candy on the floor, followed by my dad saying the devil licked it; it’s not good anymore. The horror of his words stayed with me, my thoughts racing with questions. What if I fall? Will I not be good anymore?
When I finally gained the courage to ask my question, I was told not to ask stupid questions. I wasn’t told no, was it stupid because, obviously, the devil will take you if you fall. Again, as any child would, I tried gaining some security and asked, will God not try to save me?
I was met with: if you’re asking whether He will save you, then you are doubting His power.
I rebutted: but God is all the way in heaven, and the devil is right at our feet.
I was yelled at then: “Do you want to go live with the devil? Is that what you want? Go then, you ask the devil who is faster.”
Dark scenes of burning in hell have long engulfed dreams.
And so it goes for many children raised with fear, not understanding parable from reality, building literal hells on earth at their feet, filling in holes in attempts to gain security and rejecting any digging for fear of coming face to face with the devil.
I have felt the same confusion the red story painters felt when they saw joy swimming in the blue painter’s eyes, dancing around the land mines that we carefully avoid, their strength only fortified by the fires that once engulfed our dreams.
That feeling of a thread being pulled, a thread woven so tightly into every part of our bodies. I can see it stretching from our toes to our hips, bobbing in and out of sight, emerging from our chests and stitching itself up into our throats, only to surface again at our temples.
The fear that this thread is the only thing holding us together, the fear that it alone keeps us from falling, that it is the only thing tethering us to the light, is all-consuming. To seek where this fear comes from is to dig within ourselves.
I can see why the red painter chooses their colors: their fires burn down doubt and foster a uniformity that feels like shelter. The forceful nature of making one history the only truth allows for a peaceful life where there is never a need to look too deeply at the fears that weave between our ribs.
But the fires have now been fed past gluttony. Feasting deeply on the fears and pains the artist’s fan.
The flames grow so large, pain coloring their vision so completely. They no longer notice fear creeping beneath the heat.
Where once the artist who painted in blues used fire to break open cages that silenced their voice, fueled by the hope of acceptance, that same fire is now fed by yelling, not as a call for help, but by those who only seek to argue.
Where their fire once burned blue, melting bars and clearing the wreckage of their prisons, now it burns only to gather a following.
I can see why their flames turned a spiteful crimson, engulfing the very causes that were so hard-earned, feeding on the fear that once took their autonomy.
The flames, in all their gluttony. Turned toward devouring the hard-earned monuments the voiceless fought so hard for. Turning to ash the promises once thought protected from the flames.
And for a moment, the artists that paint their stories in red felt relief.
But they refuse to see.
These fires they thought were under their control were no longer dependent on their fears.
These fires do not care if they are fueled by yellings of truths.
They do not care if they are fueled by the greens of the forest
or the oils of the earth,
not even if they are fueled by the blood of the people.
The constant yelling and arguing over their truths have built a fire so tall and wide that it awoke to the realization that it needed more kindling. Their fears alone could not maintain the towering blaze, and so the flames called to the devil, asking for fuel to continue their rampage across the land. The devil readily agreed, whispering into the ears of the rose-colored painters, promising safety in the one true story.
It’s easy to see why the fire called on the devil, for the red painters would yell and argue so loudly. When the devil was at their feet, avoiding digging for answers that could lead to understanding, what would they do now when they could feel the heat of his breath at their necks? What would they be willing to burn now that looking back meant staring into the eyes of the very being they had avoided for so long?
All I can do now is watch as the fire pushes well past gluttony, gorging on victories once won and the sheltered minds of children too terrified to dig.
My own fire burns low, neglected while I sought warmth in the wreckage of my neighbor’s house.
This brief reprieve allows me to see what these flames lack: the very things that once kept us human, understanding, compassion, kindness, and empathy. These were the foundations of the hymns first sung before they were buried beneath histories of fear.
The waters that once kept the fires from spreading are no longer allowed to color our vision. We have traded the cool clarity of the river for the tinted painting of stories not our own.
And so I turn back to my own hearth, knowing that staring at fires fed by rage and greed only causes the flames to burn longer.
If empathy has long been burned away, the least we can do is not add fuel to the fire.
The least we can do is tend to the fires that burn within us.
A Note from the Author:
We often spend so much time fanning the fires of the stories we’ve been told that we forget to ask whether those stories are still keeping us warm, or whether they are simply feeding on our own energy.
I’m curious: when you look at the national headlines today, do you see the red and blue painters at work?
If you feel called to share, I’d love to hear your thoughts, not as a shout meant to fuel the fire, but as a conversation that leaves room for empathy to flow.
Amy, to answer your question, yes, I do see the red & blue painters at work in the media, which mostly left-wing but not always telling the truth. I cannot talk to conservatives, and worse, I can no longer talk to most liberals (of which I am one). They are mostly distorting the story, clinging to hyperbole, and worse, name-calling those on the other side. What does that do but increase the rage and fear? It's like they (conservatives and liberals) are on opposite service drives of a sunken freeway, shouting at each other across the wide gulf. No one is listening, and especially no one is digging for the real facts, the whole story. That's what I crave -- the whole story, the long perspective (I mean LONG in terms of both time and place). Otherwise, if I stay in the here and now, and just rant and listen to others rant (Rachel Maddow, Bernie), I will crumble.
And about yelling: you are so right. Yelling is VIOLENCE, and the natural response to violence is, and always will be, fight or flight. You either counterattack, or run away. But nobody's listening any more.