IMAGINE THAT …

There is a land that thrives on the profit from production and celebrates the convenient use of real, verifiable weapons of mass destruction that constantly kill three times more of its own citizens every month than were victimized in the world trade center on 9/11/01 and exploited as justification for an, as yet ongoing, vengeful genocide of over a million residents of two countries not at war with it. In this land twenty-seven thousand individuals kill themselves using these weapons every year, taking fifteen thousand collaterally damaged innocent bystanders with them every year, and knowingly release a chemically poisonous gas as an afterthought killing an additional sixty-three thousand by respiratory failure every year, year after year like clockwork, give or take a couple thousand rounded off and rubbed out statistics. The lands being reduced to rubble in retribution just so happen to be rich in the energy required to maintain the suicide/murder pact agreed to in the land that loves cars. Imagine that…

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My friend Rita began losing her eyesight and muscle strength as she grew older to the point that when she plowed into a curb one day I had to tell her she should stop driving, to which she replied, “Don’t worry, I won’t get hurt, I have this big old Cadillac to protect me!” I’m so fed up with the leaf-blower version of responsibility so rampant within my culture I feel like publishing an angry post about the hundred and eighty pounds of rich, black, fertile leaf mold I just harvested for the spring garden from the pile I raked last fall — with the rake I walked three miles to Callahan’s to purchase — but I can’t. Just thinking about learning to live the alternative to cultural crises calms me down.