Lurking

It has threatened rain now for days, high clouds yesterday and today. Heavy laden with rain, but semingly unwilling to release their burden. This has been a long, hot dry summer since the solstice, without the artifical supplements provided by my own paid for water supply most of my flowers and trees and vegetables would be suffering for water now. They are not as adapted as the wild flowers that continue to creep skyward across Front Street. The things we desire, the aesthetics we aspire to, these are always more work than taking what has come to us and finding beauty there. Against the judging eyes of my neighbors, however, I have not cut my lawn every time it seems long, but let the grass hold its moisture. Do we know how to manage our mini ecosystems even? I see chemicals and exotics everywhere I look up and down my block. I let wild flowers flourish and neighbors ask why I'm growing weeds. How we come to the life around us, I think, tells us how we come to our own fact of life. We struggle for control and achieve something less.

As in my yard, so it is in the nation. Fools embrace foolish ideas, uncritical claims of superiority and unquestioned acts of brutality and injustice and still she shops for a brand new SUV and pushes her gas-guzzling Navigator out into traffic with air conditioning blasting her senses and the DVD player keeping the young ones quiet in back. How can we come to know each other or what we live for under such conditions? It may not have been a conscious plan, but conservative America has dumbed us down and prepared us to be good consumers in their economy. George Bush is evil, but all the citizens of this once great nation who have been snowed into believing otherwise are the real culprits. Ignorance is no excuse, even if the markets try to tell you it is. Shame. Shame on you. You know who I mean.