The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise
--
. F. Scott Fitzgerald
This quotation is very apt just now, with the war clock ticking inexorably on. It would be so easy to fall into despair. Be alert to signs of it in yourself or the people around you - a well-timed word of encouragement can bring someone out of an emotional nosedive, so be quick to ask for and quick to give a bracing word. The world needs us to keep protesting, thinking, writing, working and speaking out for peace, and to be able to keep on, we need to be compassionate with ourselves and with one another.
Courage, mes ami(e)s .
Chris
I cannot do everything, but I can do something. I must not fail to do the something that I can do.
- Helen Keller
Let America be America Again, Round 2
Let America be America again . . . --Langston Hughes
But was it ever? Perhaps for those
who roamed with buffalo and spirit song
before Vespucci came
bearing a name so foreign to their lives.
Perhaps for the families
pushing their wagons west
planting crude crosses
as they rutted heartland and rivers,
the challenge of mountains.
Already conquest was the national business,
raucous scratch to a country's underbelly
bleeding out in expanding circles
from a foreign object tossed in a sea of salt.
That poet who pleaded Let America be America
again, let it be the dream it used to be
was black and queer and knew how to sing
to all who live upon this land.
Could he feel, in the pain of a slave grandmother
the fireball that would one day consume
patients in an Afghan hospital,
or see Iraq-half children-
pulverized beneath American bombs?
His years spanned Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Santo Domingo.
Could he have imagined poorly-fed guerrillas
routing the greatest war machine
or a U.S. dictator who would spread his smiling teeth
to swallow the world?
For America to be America
we might start by giving back the name
it grabbed for us alone,
stole from the nations of Central, Latin
and South America.
For America to be America
each of us might begin
by opening one ear to Langston's plea
and putting the other to the ground
where water shrinks in the aquifers
rocks move with gravitational flow
birds nest
before flight
and small animals like those on every continent await our next move.
--Margaret Randall, Albuquerque Spring 2003
One Way to Stop the War for All of Us
101. Give up the belief that the world is going to hell in a handbasket. Put fear to one side, and replace it with the confidence that we can solve our many problems, if we work together. We are incredibly creative, inventive people. We have to do this. What other option do we have? There is a Native American story about a grandfather, talking to his young grandson. He tells the boy that he has two wolves inside him that are struggling with each other. The one is the wolf of peace, love and kindness. The other is the wolf of fear, greed and hatred. "Which wolf will win, grandfather?" asks the young boy. "Whichever one I feed," is the reply.