Stalemate Showdown

A traffic jam of anxieties converges in my mind
each vehicle holding a tiny dictator-occupant shaking a fist,
honking, yelling, cursing in pip-squeak sounds
It's rush hour in my life again.

A railroad yard crowded with beached steel on wheels,
Heavy boxcars squealed to a stubborn halt and
their morose bullying bulk demands my action.
Called to be the magic conducter,
flipping switches, giving clearance
When I'd rather
let their dead weights explode into each other and burn

When I can't escape the logjam,
When I can't shout over them
When they refuse to be ignored
when they refuse to disperse
with their heavy freights
When running away just means
they'll catch up again,
I can't take any prisoners
I have to banish them all
One way or another
I have to deal with each one
and send them on their way
One by one.

An Early Lesson in Greed

I learned a lot of valuable lessons from my Dad early on. Like, the reward of being loyal to a particular team, no matter how abysmal their performance year after year: that loyalty is its own reward. That it's ok for a man to cry. That it's ok to be imperfect, as long as you're genuinely you. Like not compromising your beliefs. But one of my Dad's lessons was largely unspoken, and came to inform an unfolding perspective over many years. It is a discussion he probably doesn't even remember. This weighs heavily on my mind right now, when suddenly everything in Wisconsin seems for sale and "open for business," including public services, benefits, and worker's rights.

My parents had gotten a subscription to National Geographic for donating to some cause or other. Being interested in other places and cultures for as long as I can remember, I would thumb through every issue and study the pictures.

One month, there was a photoessay on famine in Ethiopia. I was 5 or 6. I stared at the picture of an emaciated mother holding a skeletal baby, and the light seemed extinguished in their eyes. I wondered why they were starving. Was there not enough food in the world? Did they live in a place so isolated that food couldn't get to them? Why did people have children if they were going to starve? These were the thoughts that went through my 6-year old mind.

I brought the magazine to my Dad and asked him why there wasn't enough food in the world to feed this lady and her baby. My Dad looked at the picture, and I could tell he felt angry about it.

"Well, you see, there is enough food in the world to feed everyone," he said.
"But Dad, if there's enough food, why are they starving? Can't anyone get them the food?" I asked.
"Well, let me put it this way: we could feed everyone in the world if we really wanted to," he replied.
"But Dad, I do want to!" I exclaimed in horror. "What do you mean, if only we wanted to?! Why should they starve if there is enough food??"
"Because of greed," he said. "Because there are greedy people in the world."

I didn't know what to say to that. And he seemed to have nothing more to say. So I walked away, and for days, my child's mind was obsessed with images of fat pashas gorging themselves with delicacies, and sticking their fingers down their throats so they could throw up only to stuff more food in their faces. I imagined storehouse after storehouse of grain horded by warlords with guns. Although these images subsided over the course of about a week, the seed was planted for me to have an awareness of the enormous structure of global economy, trade, and inequality in the world. What I couldn't grasp at the time, what my Dad could not explain to a child as young as I was (and maybe couldn't even explain to himself at the time), was that there were very few particular individuals gorging themselves on actual rare and expensive delights, but a huge, complicated picture of interconnected political, economic, and social forces of power and greed at work in the world on all levels--local, national, international.

My Dad taught me to see and try to understand the big picture, and about the problem of insidious and destructive greed. To try to grasp things that might defy simple explanation. To try to put a picture, instead of a face, to a concept. To realize that relatively small-scale injustices can add up to far-reaching catastrophe. To remember that greed cannot only be attributed to "warlords with guns," but to an entire global order. That the famine, or any situation, was not an isolated event with a quick and easy fix, but an entire process of historical events and factors. And that therefore, quick fixes are rarely the answer to enormous structural problems of greed, corruption, mismanagement, and inequality.

I can recall the picture of the mother and baby, and their eyes. I still wonder what happened to them. I still wonder if the light seemed extinguised because they were so hungry, or because they knew there were some who wanted to help, and others who wouldn't help.

Falling under

Sometimes it's too cold
I drive to end of the road
And I walk to the end of the land
Where the land falls under the water

Brilliant blue ice and eyes
when he appears and I ask,
"What brings you here?"

Aren't you afraid that you've run into a strange man out here?
I never fear my own people.
Are you the queen of this land, then?
Why, yes. And as queen, I know what you're seeking. I can take you to it. As long as you agree to do no harm.

Come on, let me show you these parts.
So I showed him where the deer sleep and the birds wait out the winter
I showed him how they survived and when they would go to the stream
Until he'd forgotten what he was looking for, and his intentions

As his lips turned blue to match the ice and eyes
He realized he felt the fear inside no longer
The land and water would keep him
We had time to walk in the land that falls under the water
And I showed him those parts too
And there I left him, knowing he could find his way home.