Daffodils

Is it officially spring when the daffodils show themselves? Right outside my window they have begun to peek up through the Earth. They were not there yesterday. Their growth rate is stunning. The air is warm again today, they say it could reach 50 degrees before the temperature falls again to below freezing. Rain turns to snow overnight tonight. Winter doesn't want to let go, but it's fighting a losing battle. As sap flows and water flows and all of life loosens its dormant inertia and lethargy, the days take on a hopeful feeling. Flowering plants risk their journey to the surface in search of sunlight and warmth and all the energies that help them build leaves and flowers and pistils and stamens and start the process of life all over again. I can glance backwards out my window and still see snow in piles from the blizzard of 2005, and in the foreground, little points of hope, ready to remind us all that the miracle continues.

It is shocking sometimes, then, to imagine this self-same Earth put forth such monsters as Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz, people who ignore the truths in front of them in order to serve their egos and self-righteousness, and bad plans. Hannah Arendt argued in the 1950s that political ends are so elusive and uncertain that anyone who pursues them without careful attention to the means they take is risking unmitigated disaster. In other words, if we cannot know for certain where we are going, rather than getting there as quickly and forcefully as we can, we must attend to what we can have some control over, the means. To these men, the means, which, if Arendt is right, are everything we have, do not matter. If we must kill civilians, if we must bankrupt the United States, if we must put our young men in the line of fire and terrorism, it doesn't matter because our intentions are good. How can such foolish men acquire so much power at this stage of human history? How can such outmoded and ineffective ideas control the way the world's biggest superpower carries itself in the world. The problem is, these are not idle mistakes. I resent Mr. Rumsfeld for his careless and thoughtless ways, and for making trouble that will continue to affect the lives of my grandchildren years from now. May he pay in kind for his awful decisions.