Spring Break
May 5, 2007
The earth is greening here in New England—it’s the lovely time of brilliant yellow forsythia, dainty white and pink magnolias, gay daffodils scattered across the hillsides, and every day the shiny, wrinkled new maple leaves unfold and stretch their dazzling baby green fingers. It’s beautiful!
But meanwhile, there’s been more bad news from Baghdad: Riverbend and her family have finally decided to leave. When I read this news in her blog the other day, it really sounded like the death knell for any possibility of a sane solution there. If Riverbend and her family are giving up on peace, that to me says it ain’t gonna happen, anytime soon.
There was plenty of posturing this week in Washington—Hillary calling for a vote to revoke the original Congressional authorization of war, Gates saying a pullout now will just embolden the terrorists, Bush idiotically “staying the course” in his White House bunker—but behind all the politicians and their hot air runs the steady of stream of silent flag-draped coffins coming home day by day. April was the bloodiest month of the war since 2003, and who knows what May will bring?
The war itself is just a symptom of much deeper problems, of course. Simply stopping the war isn’t enough. We have to move ahead on replacing oil with renewable energy sources. We have to stop burning so much money in weapons, and start pumping our cash into our greatest renewable resource, human beings: education, health, social welfare—and also the welfare of the planet that gives us life.
I KNOW we can turn this disastrous mess around, if we can just get enough people to understand what we must do, and why. Here is a crusade worth fighting for.
But right now it’s May in Massachusetts, and the only thing I really want to be doing is working in my garden, digging and planting until every muscle aches, and the vision I have in my mind’s eye begins to take shape in reality. At least with these small battles of earth and stone, when I quit for the day I know for sure what I’ve accomplished!
