On The Way Back From an Afternoon Jog

The road went this way and the path went that. I stood there only briefly contemplating the two. For although the wide pavement ran on thru the shade, the path was a bit narrow and wanted wear. Though as for that I could not swear that there was really a path after all up there, for it turned left quickly after going between two rocks. And it disappeared in the undergrowth.

I took the path.

Out from under the shade of the oaks, I stepped into a sweltering meadow. The black and white world of asphalt and concrete was gone. The sun blazed down from the sky. Here was grass, waist high. And Indian Blankets with seed heads the size of golf balls. And Black-Eyed Susans and Coreopsis rubbing against me as I walked. I swam in a sea of yellow blazing in the afternoon light, swells of flowers in a breeze that swirled in eddies around the stands of juniper and oak. A heron croaked as it flew off beyond the trees.

I gasped out loud.

Politicians posture and spin. Newscasters pose their stories for the cameras. Soldiers clash in distant theaters. The poor and sick go unnoticed while lies and pain and death and destruction and cheating and deception march triumphantly under waving banners with glorious words of victory adorning them in many languages.

I have no room for this that makes me wretch.

So I took the path less travelled by the commuters who drive up and down the street -- most days I am one. And I found the waving grass and the bursting yellowness in the sun.

And that made all the difference.

---
Hat tip, of course, to Robert Frost's two roads which do make all the difference.

11:26:41 PM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []  

What Have We Done?

Susan Sontag in the Guardian on why the photographs from Abu Graib do say something about all Americans even though the acts depicted might not be representative of who we think we are.

[Sontag/Guardian/What Have We Done?]: All acts are done by individuals. The question is not whether the torture was the work of a few individuals but whether it was systematic. Authorised. Condoned. Covered up. It was - all of the above. The issue is not whether a majority or a minority of Americans performs such acts but whether the nature of the policies prosecuted by this administration and the hierarchies deployed to carry them out makes such acts likely. [...] Considered in this light, the photographs are us.

12:43:06 AM   permalink: []   feedback:   comments: []