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Letter At Year's End, 2015


Dear Friends and Delightful Visitors to Smokesound:

 I have tried
but I cannot escape the fact
that politicians and gunmen are dominating
the news at the end of 2015.
The former are laughing stock that make us cry,
and the latter are tempting us to become as savage as they.  

The political buffoons—
and have you ever seen such a surplus of them?—
want us to select a leader from among them,
to lead us in baying at the moon.

The six-shooting cowboy fantasies of our childhood 
have become para-military executions in our classrooms,
tempting us to respond in guerrilla combat.

I am trying to find a way
to let neither the buffoons nor the savages 
shape the way I round the year’s end.
I want neither to elect a lout or a fool to office,
nor to line up on the other side of the classroom
with my own attack weapon, or turn my house
into an arsenal:  a potential killing field.

Something they have in common:
whether you go into a political campaign or a religious crusade
with too much certainty and ammunition, you are certain, soon,
to stop thinking and start shooting your mouth or your gun.

Whether it is a political candidate with political blather
or a politically motivated sociopath with an attack weapon,
it is wise to hide the moment you hear them say
that God is on their side.  You are the other side.

In the Middle East, it is the turn of Islam to mount crusades
to save the holy land from infidels.  Christians had their turn
about 800 years ago, give or take a century.
Awful things happened in the name of God.
Nothing is worse than a man with faith and a sword,
unless it is a man with faith and a semi-automatic rifle;
that is to say, someone with absolute certainty and a weapon.

If God is on your side, everything else is noise.
It does not matter whether it is politics,
a holy land, a belief, a better gun, or certain death.
If it is a crusade, death is acceptable.
It is not easy to think cooly, and rationally, 
when someone is shooting off his mouth in a most absurd way,
or when murder is the intent of the fanatic or the fantasizer.
But arson is not best fought with arson, 
and even the professionals say war should be a last resort.
Too many guns is not remedied with even more guns.
Anger and rage and fear breed ill-considered plans.

We need to breathe out.

The rest of the world has treated the Middle East
as if it were simply an oil field.  We had our turn at pretending
that our religion was absolute truth, our turn at 
trying to kill each other over dogma, and now
the sects of Islam are taking their turns.

When we elect people to Congress who despise government,
it should not surprise us that they cannot govern, 
nor that what we have in common deteriorates.

 This is a transitional time in human life, in the world,
maybe because we see ourselves over the horizon.
Most people have brown skin,
at least half of the people are female,
and intelligence is pretty well spread around.
Nobody, nobody,  has the absolute truth.
It doesn’t even exist.
Doing the best we can is good enough.

We wish all of you well, at the end of this year;
a chance to breathe out, and appreciate
that we have what it takes to do better than before.

                                   From One of the Other Guys
                                  Who Came Over the Horizon

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