by Primo Encarnación

According to the world population clock, there are 7.3 billion people. In terms of sand, that’s roughly 7.3 dump trucks full. Imagine all those dump trucks, and all that sand. Imagine walking up to one of them. There is a bumper, with a light spray of sand on it that didn’t quite get into the bed. Brush that sand away with the edge of your hand, gently subdividing the pile, until a few grains remain.   Now you are squatting in front of the bumper: take your fingers, and brush more grains away. There are two grains left. Flick one aside, wet your finger, and pick up the last, single, solitary grain of sand.

Step back. Back up far enough so you can see all 7.3 trucks. Now hold up your finger and regard that one grain of sand stuck there.

That’s you.

That little piece of grit that you’d notice if it was under your eyelid, but that you had to concentrate NOT to brush away with all of the other ones, indistinguishable from all of the other ones.

Insignificant, you.

But, I’m an AMERICAN, you crow! That makes me special! Really? You see that one dump truck that’s only not-quite 1/3 of the way full? Watch it drive off. That’s the US of A. Gone. There’s still 7 entire dump trucks full of sand. Ain’t you bad!

I’m a Christian! That makes me special. Oh yeah? Two dump trucks on the left drive away. There are your Christians. Two dump trucks on the right drive away. There go the Muslims. Three whole entire dump trucks full of sand left.

How special are you now?

You’re nothing.

So where do you get off punching someone who insulted you? Where do you get off telling other people how to live their lives? What allows you to decide that you’re going to buy a gun specifically to wipe other people out, because their set of cosmological fairy tales does not dovetail EXACTLY with your set of cosmological fairy tales.

What unimaginable hubris is at work in your tiny, tiny brain when you buy a box of nails for shrapnel to bomb that church? How incredibly full of yourself are you when you are trying to decide what type of cloth works best as a wick on a Molotov cocktail? How hyper-inflated is your ego as you slide that last round into a magazine, knowing that it will be the first out of the barrel and into the brain of somebody you never met before, or into the brain of your best friend, or into the brain of your wife, because YOU are righteous, and somebody’s done YOU wrong, and somebody’s got to pay!

You’re not righteous. You’re not special. You’re nobody. You’re nothing but a single grain of sand, whose only value is as one of many, many other grains of sand. Together, you can hold back tides. Together, you can stop bullets. Together you can not only change history, you are history.

Do you want to feel special? Do you deserve this, that or the other? Why? Why YOU, and not these others? Why are the two dump trucks full of devotees of middle eastern fairy tales any better, or any worse, or in any way different than the other two dump trucks full of other devotees of other middle eastern fairy tales?

You are only special in so far as the others are special. The only legitimate way to exalt yourself is if all the other grains of sand are exalted in the same way. Doing away with other pieces of sand does not make you special, or rare, or important. It just reduces the meaning of being sand.

Everybody has a right to sleep safe and warm. To eat nutritious food and to drink clean water. To live in an unraped ecosystem. To be unraped themselves. To live free from fear. They have the right to their thoughts, their beliefs, their opinions, and the right to voice them.  They have a right to be with others, or to be alone. They have the right, quite simply, to be.

As long as everyone has those rights, you have those rights. But as soon as you try to take them away from anyone, then yours are no longer safe, either.

If you can kill anyone you want because of some slight, real or imagined. If you can kill anyone you want because you think that’s what your god wants. If you can kill anyone you want because America, dammit! Then anyone can kill you for whatever reason is important to them, too.

He who humbles himself shall be exalted, the fairy tales say. Be sand, people. Be the best grain of sand you can be. Be within yourself. Lift up the other grains around you, that you may be lifted by them.

Those seven point three dump trucks? They are dumping sand into the top of a giant hourglass. You and the 7.3 billion other grains are swirling in a sand maelstrom. Eventually, it will be your single, solitary turn to fall all alone through the opening into…

But that’s the only time in your hourglass that you must be truly alone. At that moment, how does one measure the worth of a grain of sand?