Falling off the Sword
Fall has fallen upon us, but slipped. Like a blanket of wet leaves, only the trees haven't shed their arboreal load, except here and there. The seasonally-mellifluous rains have been singular; we're still watering, since the skies aren't. Actuarially, we're already three inches dry. But the green is poking up, so the deer have departed Linda's gardens to graze their own lands. As she has departed, flown the nest to visit her sister in Seattle for the weekend.
I sit at the computer, as I do every morning, and by eight o'clock have already checked the mail and a coupla headline services, as is the case every morning, unless Linda has the day off, too. And when she doesn't shoot outta bed to dead-head these and say incantations over those. Somehow this fall the calendar has been crowded with his-'n-her trips here and there, for work and family.
There's a semblance of everything moving along, semi-apace. Indeed, watching the news — not something I would recommend — one would think that the terrorism of September 11th and since has simply been incorporated into the social psyche, and on we go, as if by going on, everything will be all right. It's not clear why people think that dropping bombs on Afghanistan is going to stop the mailing of anthrax letters in the United States. Will we simply get over the threats to our bridges today and our nuclear reactors tomorrow? Do we think there will be no more attacks? Is there anything we can do about this threat?
I had lunch today with my pal Bruce, his lovely wife and their brand new daughter. She was born four days after the attack, in a changed world. Bruce, who's a dear, thoughtful fellow and well-grounded in aikido and other Eastern ideas, has a serious need for this world to get its act together, for their lovely young infant. We won't be here when she is our age. We have to make sure that the planet she inherits is as gloriously munificent as the one we arrived at a half-century ago.
There's a lotta work that needs to be done. Beyond resolving the crisis we're having with the Isloonies, there's Northern Ireland, where the Protestant psychotics just took the latest step away from peace by refusing to re-elect David Trimble. Also, the three dozen formal armed conflicts scattered about the globe, most fueled on at least one side by American-made weapons.
And once we stop the shooting, we need to clean up our war mess. The hundreds of millions of land mines which we might have been picking up by now, if Clinton hadn't failed us, again. Then there are the stockpiles of chemical weapons, and twenty thousand nuclear warheads, an accident with which we wouldn't want to face. On the non-military front, we'll need to clean up thousands of toxic waste sites and mountains of buried garbage.
It's not altogether clear how we get there from here. Maybe we need more people on board the possibility. Only 20% of the pre-Americans in 1776 favored the rebellion against Great Britain. Some were some mighty fine folks. Imagine what we could do today if our leadership included people like Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, and Paine. The mind reels.
And that's SetonnoteS...I'm Tony Seton.
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