I’d like to go back to Oz…   
by B Johnston 
December 1, 2006

I recently discovered that I have been cheated. Not like I got incorrect change at the grocery store…like having someone I trusted actually steal from me. I don’t know when it started but I now know that it had become systematic and that there was an obvious plan for it to be an amount of felonious proportions. At the same time, I am beginning to hear that this person has launched a campaign of verbal assault on my character. We had no angry parting and have had no confrontation regarding this matter, so I am assuming that this is a preemptive strike.

There are sympathetic reasons that people steal. They are hungry. They are desperate. They are afraid. You don’t have to condone the act to understand that a person can be driven to the point of taking what they need. But I am unaware of such circumstances in this case. Emerging details reveal that anger had more to do with it. Why else suggest to others that they “make [me] pay”?

I am hurt and confounded by the degree of hostility being revealed and I am challenged, despite my beliefs, to withhold judgment. I am looking at my own responsibility in creating this dynamic and I am revisiting the karmic lesson that has defined my life. The comic in me wants to call it “stupidity” but it is, in truth, an almost willful gullibility. I’ve been getting to know it for over 50 years.

When I was 5, there was a dainty girl, half my size, who ordered me out of the sandbox. Impatient with my confused face, she drew back a tiny fist and punched me in it. I cried from disbelief, as much as from the pain. I was in the double digits before I learned to disappear when my older brother asked me to “hold this” or “stand here” or “pretend to shake my hand”. I walked home, several miles, in the Chicago winter after giving my bus fare to a slick young panhandler who ran away laughing. I’ve been suckered regularly in big and small ways and I’m trying to learn from those experiences, so that I don’t repeat them. But some basic element in me resists. Some part of me, like Dorothy, believes in the Wizard. In me, separate from the world of ownership and yours vs. mine, is a tribal memory that stirs with understanding that we are, in fact, in it with and for each other. I simply don’t want to be the one who walks, unfeeling, past the empty cup. I don’t want to be one who is never fooled, because the doors to my heart are vaulted shut. I want to be the one who, even now, shines the light of love on a broken friendship.

It’s tough, but I’m working on it.

copyright © 2005 B Johnston

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