Illusion Of Spring

I still have an illusion here, sitting by a window looking out on sunny skies and southerly springtime breezes and bright green leaves just coming out...

I still have an illusion here, listening to the morning doves and the cardinals and the sparrows and the mocking birds and the wrens and the redwing blackbirds singing in the trees...

I still have an illusion here, with glistening water lapping against the roots of the Cypress trees by the river's edge in the afternoon...

I still have an illusion here, protected as I am by the absence of television in this house...

I still have an illusion of spring.

But I know better than to trust it all. I know that far away, under billowing clouds of burning oil, in the blowing sands in the desert, in the stifling cockpits and hand-dug trenches of Iraq, people are dying.

No illusion of spring can change that.

And no promises of overpowering shock and awe, no presentations of precision munitions being efficiently delivered to their targets, no pictures of presidential palaces bombed and burning, no number of journalists broadcasting from their embedded positions with the northward marching forces, no announcements of cities and chemical plants captured or of enemy soldiers surrendering can hide the fact that this war like all others will be ugly and painful.

And in spite of the efforts of American bureaucrats and political pundits and media magnates to glorify the cause and sanitize the war for mass consumption at home, the fact remains that many men and women and children will never see blue skies or glistening water or live to see another spring.

This is the cost of the decisions we have made.

12:32:33 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []