We pay taxes for this?

The mostly cloudy and cooler weather this week have left me increasingly uninspired. The weekend's warmer temperatures and approaching peak in leaf color should help perk me up, especially if I give up watching and/or reading the news.

Autumn maples enhancing a red barn

Photo by J. Harrington

For now, let's play a little Friday fun game. See if you can figure out the message I'm sending with the following list of current news stories.

• The republican house can't find a way to elect a speaker.


• Cleaning up the country's water seems beyond reach
  • Federal appeals court blocks Obama administration rules protecting small streams, wetlands
  • Lawsuit says Minnesota needs a tougher stance to clean up Lake Pepin


• We continue to trip over the second amendment
  
  • Northern Arizona University shooting leaves one dead and three injured
  • Gun-rights activists protest Obama visit to Oregon town trying to heal from campus killings


• Nobel peace prize: national dialogue brought Tunisia back from the brink

O.K. here's the message in the form of a question: Do you suppose we could hire the Tunisia national dialogue folks to provide training for our politicians (and the rest of us)? We seem to be having our own version of an Arab Spring that's continuing through Autumn into Winter.

It's Not That

By Maureen N. McLane 

It's not that I'm opposed

to poison in my lips

or pig in my soap—

it's not that I'm opposed.

It's not that I'm opposed

to plastic bottles that won't decompose

to malodorous phosphorus flows—

it's not that I'm opposed

to what you propose—

surgery on your imperfect nose

favelas blasted

with hoses— it's not that

I'm opposed to opposing

the opposite of anonymous

neighbors, the nosy stargazers

who discover new celebrity planets

about to crash into your car. It's not that

I'm opposed that we drive

when it's not very far

to walk or bike not opposed

you're opposed to the subway

the stink of the general—

train 4, 5, or 6–not opposed

to the sex on Craigslist

to your pets' special tricks

to the organized slaughter of cows

by the tenderest machines—

not opposed to your dreams

to their screams to our hopes

not opposed to the hordes

with their ropes knives and bombs

set in desolate streets slums

and thrumming towns not opposed

to your proms and baptisms

to ongoing Christian schisms

most unopposed to fierce Muslims

Jews Baha'is and Hindus posed

in poses temples now oppose

the Kama Sutra too ooh-la-la

for the petit-bourgeois members of the BJP

—not opposed to a big GDP

to a loud ATV not opposed to anything

I can see hear or touch

to "enough or too much"—

It's not that I'm opposed

to whatever I should propose

opposing, knowing

knowing is thinning

in the species' extra inning

on a world slow spinning on an

axis slightly tilting

into folly so is it folly

to suppose you could oppose

proposing something to oppose

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