The Simple Short View

I have a fine pair of lightweight eyeglasses,
old enough to qualify as a family heirloom.
They do not brutalize the bridge of my nose,
as all earlier glasses did, causing me to become
a nose-massager, as if pondering great ideas.

Unfortunately, they rest close enough to my eyes
so that my eyelashes smear oil on the inner side.
After a while, the Milky Way turns milky,
and most of what I see is eyelash smear.
The long view is denied me. I am not alone.

People demand that the Border Patrol stop
the smuggling of drugs into the country;
they do not admit who the paying customers are.

My neighbor says we have to stop Mexicans
from coming up here for work for cheap wages:
he doesn't ask who it is who wants to hire them.

Baby boomers are retiring, without young workers
to work and pay taxes, but they don't want to
allow young, hard-working immigrants into the country.

People hate paying taxes, because government
is evil and awful, and then complain that
there are potholes in the street, and bad schools.

Others lament the loss of a (fictitious) white Christian
nation, and never wonder what would be left if all
the non-believers, brown-skinned people, Muslims,
Blacks, and reprobates like me were sent packing.

The short view is so simple. No stars. No horizon.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

Search This Blog