I love The Nation. Sure, some of their columnists are stark raving lefty lunatics (like me), but no apologetics here. It's basically an open forum, and it's amazing how sensible this 'left-wing' magazine can be. It's a shame that all of the big bookstores around Tulsa stopped carrying them earlier this year. Those store managers probably saw too many offensive slogans on the covers, too much criticism of the President, too much anti-war sentiment. Isn't censorship just fucking grand? (hint, Borders and Barnes & Noble)
Yesterday's article by Robert Scheer (contributing editor and columnist for the LA Times) pretty much sums up my view on the kind of leadership we now have in this country, and how sedaded we have become in the face of all this violence.
from A Devil's Island for Our Times
"The President who apparently authorized a global reign of prisoner torture in the "war on terror" is our own elected leader, not a convenient caricature of a foreign dictator. The military and legal systems that have looked the other way are our own.
"Unfortunately, we look more and more like our enemies every day. On an island invaded, sabotaged and barred from US trade and even tourism in the name of spreading our version of democracy, we have erected a massive torture chamber any deranged dictator would envy."
So put that in your christmas stocking and give it to your kids.
On a more personal note, today is my wife's grandmother's funeral, and I'm one of the pallbearers. We get to dress up in itchy little suits and walk through the gravestones. I truly believe that it will be a joyous occasion in the end, because 94 years is a wonderfully long life and something to be celebrated! Of course, it's really tough when someone moves on, no matter how old, but I have a feeling this experience will enrich people's lives and become a spiritual awakening for some. For all philosophy is founded on the idea of death; what we must do to truly live and the nature of our being. Without death, there would be no philosopy, spirutuality, not like we have it today. It's a celebration of life AND death, because it's all the same thing in the end. A complete circle.
Let children walk with Nature, let them see the beautiful blendings and communions of death and life, their joyous inseparable unity, as taught in woods and meadows, plains and mountains and streams of our blessed star, and they will learn that death is stingless indeed, and as beautiful as life.
John Muir
posted by novachild @ Wednesday, December 29, 2004,
