BLACK HOLES ON BLACK WALLS

I. Down to the end

I was in Niš, Yugoslavia when I heard President Clinton address the nation in the wake of Columbine. There was a heightened sense of attention in me as my wife waited our first daughter in the hospital. A father I would become and every source of information was worth the effort to comprehend. Not every would find use in me, but I wasn’t passing anything along.

NATO planes drop cluster bombs and break the sound barrier just to put you off nerve. Clinton tells our children to look for nonviolent conflict resolution as the electricity goes off and ten million people stand around and talk about when the electricity will return and who has a gas stove to cook us coffee.

American pilots fly over Nis our best and brightest. Told to go kill and not to ask too many questions. My daughter leaves the hospital and cluster bombs arrive. A pair of anonymous Americans and not one miss, but the market square as well. There are legs on the news. These well engineered blue canisters still waiting to kill along your path home. You don’t really see body parts on the screen, they consume you. And you move on.

Why couldn’t one pilot refuse? As a son of the American Revolution I guess I took it a little more personal than most. Those born there understood from how far away he had come. Maybe there were women pilots, they didn’t seem to be.

I worked at the center for nonviolent conflict resolution. I had learned a trade 3 years in Bosnia. Clinton is like the white man from South Africa who tells you that nonviolent conflict resolution brought them peace. Only Hollywood has more violence than Africa. When a bully is perceived as rational: wrong causes are attributed. Diversity and struggle down to the end.

II. Should the state provide

The world is full of fissures and creases…the jet as it was such a natural design. There is no contradiction. Are women equal Socrates? I sit in my junior level class and listen to a brief overview of justice. Hamurabi through Moses to Plato down through Muhammad past St. Augustine least we forget Jerome. The man is hot and dry, the women is cold and wet. So was theirs to reason.

Every day the lottery we have each played: to be born to have or born to have not. Born to search or born to receive. I such came to breath in Euclid, Ohio. Born male to work for my dollar; Two years later my sister to work for her seventy-five cents. There is no contradiction…everyone is wrong in a way that creates your illusions. Someone once told me, in Amsterdam, you just contradicted every philosopher. Had anyone else my concern?

There was no theory of my life. I speak to you much later. In my junior level class where we each wait to earn our dollar…the women seem unconcerned with their seventy-five cents. Why does it bother me?

There is one thing. That first worldview I held. Not the one I remember, but what they said of me. The rest of my life was a process of unlearning what my soul clearly told me. Then I read the story in the census 2000: For every male dollar earned the female worker can expect seventy-five cents. On average, you say, things are much better for women. I only ask: What was it that needed to be fixed and how was everything so and still broken?

You live history and learn History…if nothing understand this; you will find no fear speaking what it is you have come to believe. For to any of their theories of everything you are relevant. The state to assure this fact as right would find peace in the course of affairs. It is Star-Trek science with ancient social structures. Forty years forward the contradiction revealed; it was ignorance and the generations so surreal.

III. The most natural of thing

Perhaps there are different rules at different times. Perhaps children cannot be charged as adults. What ever your point…there are more topics than your words when you understand that life is taking you and precious time you still have.

I had lost you my audience. Who it is I am writing to. Words cross the abyss. Much is farther than we know. We here upon our island of this sun. Much has been and resolved with what we have imagined. A keystroke from revolution so secure in our form.

There’s a time when the sun rides on the back of the waves
There’s a time when the sun builds its island in the sun
There’s a time when the ocean is all that you see

It’s how she left me standing that I could see