No Point in Rushing the End Times

That is a dreaded sight!
An empty driveway;
not a newspaper in sight.

What is morning without coffee and a couple of newspapers?
The New York Times and the Arizona Daily Star?
The latest in a long line of newsprint stretching back sixty years?

I know, although I will not admit it,
that news by newsprint is morbid.
I first subscribed to the NYT when, in the early sixties,
a Western Edition was first printed in Los Angeles.
Almost always, ever since, there have been at least two, and sometimes three,
newspapers in our driveway every morning.

I am not opposed to electronic print media.
I am altogether too familiar with logging on to online editions
of newspapers I have become familiar with,
only to have the screen lurch in protest that I have not paid to read them digitally,
so they go go blank, and then present me with gobs of guilt at being a freeloader,
and then proffer redemption by credit card subscription.
There is no admission that I have, often for decades,
paid for their paper editions even when they were hardly worth reading,
full of local sports and second-hand national news.

What is morning without coffee and a couple of newspapers?
No matter that I might already have gotten up in the middle of the night
for one reason or another and, since I was already up,
stumbled to the computer for news, should there be some.

Morning is coffee and a couple of newspapers,
and Mari across the table, finishing a letter or two,
clearing our throats with caffeine,
gradually finding the pitch together,
antiphonally weaving what we have read into a tune.

"Codger!", I hum to myself when we pause.
"I am an old codger who believes in newsprint,
who believes in coffee and ceremony and printed liturgy."

"Let there be newspapers on the driveway! Amen, and Amen!"

Comments

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

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