Posted by panch from pool0127.cvx20-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.250.127) on Wednesday, July 03, 2002 at 8:08AM :
I don't suppose I'm invading anyone's privacy by writing that Lina was rushed to hospital emergency a few days ago for a blood transfusion. Her condition has worsened and there isn't enough time for another picnic to raise a few hundred dollars. It's maddening...heartbreaking. I was criticized some time back for saying this generation and maybe the next of Iraqi children are lost to us...maybe we could help the third one...maybe. I was told to not be so cynnical. I realize there isn't any sympathy for those children here...but Lina is an Assyrian girl from Syria. It's just that these things seem to rise and fall depending on the luck of the draw.
Because I was a citizen when my son had cancer, his treatment was paid for by the government because I was too broke. He and I would have been in this same predicament otherwise, and I'd have had to watch him die...so would he.
Desperate calls are being made again...as they are on behalf of our people in the north...not the south. Can we have ten dollars here please...can you give us one hundred dollars there please....thank you so much for your thousand dollars etc. Jeff says there should be an endowment fund...there should be.
Her plight is exactly our own. We remain insular and isolated. We also make of this Heritage the sort of place that our most successful people want to leave far behind. In Detroit a woman who isn't even Chaldean has found a way to create a Chaldean fund that gets seven million dollars a year from the Federal government with which she helps people. She has her own building and staff.
The funds are there...we don't want to go ask for them because we know we can't make a decent presentation...and because as soon as anyone gets a hint of it...we'll be fighting ourselves, OURSELVES, on the courthouse steps claiming the other guy isn't pure etc. And no one will get anything.
When most other people in a race see one person pull ahead, they just try harder and take the loss with good grace. Not us. When we fall behind, we stop running, never want to train for or run a race again, and we stop to throw a shoe at the front runner so maybe we'll trip him up and no one wins.
There will be a heartfelt outpouring of love and tears at Lina's funeral...you know there will. Every priest we have will hop into his Lincoln Towncar and drive over. Solemn prayers to this nation in its Diapers will be offered up...once again we'll invoke God's love for us. We'll pour tears down each other's necks about 1678 and 1933...and add Lina to the martyrs list.
No one person, not even the collective meagre resources of one faction of our community...not even all the resouces of all of us, can begin to serve our needs. The wealthiest film producer gets financing from other people. In all this time we could have begun to practise approaching government agencies to see how a fund or a grant could be gotten...other people do it.
We're too busy lamenting the past and picking over the fine points of who is what and which language is pure. Pure idiots, that's the one thing we know we all are. The resources are out there...like they are to enable us too to place our monuments in public. All we have to do is break this ancient cycle of fighting among each other...that's all. There are resources there available to us...we have to earn them that's all. And any fund or anything we create some day can be named for Lina Nissan.
-- panch
-- signature .