Truth or Dare?

The following are headlines from the on-line editions of today’s newspapers. The first one makes an assertion. The rest, although not written as such, in my opinion validate that assertion. My question is, what, if anything, are we going to do in response? I’m leaning toward joining the Luddite-Anarchist party myself but there may be an even better option. Read on!

FROM The Guardian

• ‘America is broken’: FBI criticized for mass-shooting survival video
• New Mexico shooting: at least three dead and multiple wounded
• Mormon church has $100bn ‘clandestine hedge fund’, says whistleblower
• ‘Impossible to hold him accountable’: DeSantis signs laws to ease 2024 run
• US supreme court pursuing rightwing agenda via ‘shadow docket’, book says

FROM The Star-Tribune

• Twin Cities metro roads have become far more dangerous since the pandemic began 
• Lawmakers pulling together exemption for Mayo Clinic in Minnesota nurse staffing bill
• Man receives 103-year sentence for killing 4 in St. Paul, hiding bodies in Wisconsin field
• Minneapolis police respond to fights at DFL convention
• Windom pork plant was losing $6M a month, bankruptcy files reveal

Now, your mileage may vary, but I’m hard pressed to find enough positive stories to balance the ones listed above. I could simply ignore the news and social media but that doesn’t mean the negative events aren’t happening. Perhaps America isn’t yet broken, but we’ve certainly lost our way and can’t even agree on which direction’s home. Then again, would we recognize home these days if we were there?

is this apple tree broken?

Photo by J. Harrington

There is one way to find that answer. I recently finished reading Rob Hopkins' From What Is to What If. If you share the kind of concerns implicit in today’s posting, see if you can get your hands on a copy and read it. It may suggest the best ways we have available of being the kind of ancestors our descendants will bless rather than curse.

Now What

Solmaz Sharif

And so I sat at a tall table
in an Ohio hotel,
eating delivery:
cheese bread

with garlic butter, only it was
not butter, but partially
hydrogenated soy
bean oil

and regular soybean oil and it
came in a little tub like
creamer that’s also not
dairy.

America in 2019
means a poem will have to
contain dairy that is,
in fact,

not dairy. On Instagram: a man
has bought a ten foot by four
foot photo of a bridge
he lives

beside, bridge he can see just outside
his window, window which serves
as a ten foot by four
foot frame.

My materialist mind, I can’t
shake it. Within a perfect
little tub of garlic
butter,

a relief of workers, of sickles,
fields of soy. We were tanners
pushed to the edge of the
city

once, by the stench, the bubble of vats
of flesh and loosening skin,
back when the city pulled,
leather

bucket by leather bucket, its own
water from wells. Then we worked
the cafeterias
at the

petroleum offices of the
British. Then, revolution—

Simple.

********************************************
Thanks for visiting. Come again when you can.
Please be kind to each other while you can.