Our Lady of the Lakes: Nov 9, 2008

Sunday, November 9, 2008

Guns, burning crosses, angry white men, and other stupid shit.

Along with all the people who are celebrating a new era in American history, are those who are terrified that their grasp on power is loosening, and are pulling all kinds of stupid shit in response to the election.

Like, for example, the people who thought it was a good idea to burn a cross on an Indian-American guy's lawn in New Jersey because his wife had created a banner congratulating President elect Barack Obama on his victory.

And, for instance, the angry, violent gang of white men who, encountering a high-school-aged Liberian-American Muslim on Staten Island on election night, shouted "Obama!" and proceeded to beat him with a baseball bat.

And then there are those who are just threatened by the possibility of change they embodied in President-elect Obama, even though some of them nominally support change. There's something a little terrifying to me about the fact that America is arming itself with record speed even though Obama confirms our right to bear arms. Glenn Parshal, a gun retailer in Las Vegas says, "One of the strangest things that I've had happen the past few weeks, is I've had a lot of people come in here wearing Obama buttons and Obama t-shirts, in here to buy guns, they tell me they're in here to buy 'em before he bans 'em."

I need to follow this up with a photograph from the country road I take home from Ann Arbor. The local resident there initially set up a wooden, spray-painted sign informing passing motorists that "SOCIALISTS ARE THIEVES." Now, he's added two more, including one warning us to "LOAD UP ON AMMO."

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
-- Henry David Thoreau (1817 – 1862) (Walden or Life in the Woods)

Listener up there! Here, you! What have you to confide to me?
Look in my face, while I snuff the sidle of evening;
Talk honestly—no one else hears you, and I stay only a minute longer.

Do I contradict myself?
Very well, then, I contradict myself;
(I am large—I contain multitudes.)

I concentrate toward them that are nigh—I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day’s work? Who will soonest be through with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? Will you prove already too late?

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me—he complains of my gab and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed—I too am untranslatable;
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me;
It flings my likeness after the rest, and true as any, on the shadow’d wilds;
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air—I shake my white locks at the runaway sun;
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeathe myself to the dirt, to grow from the grass I love;
If you want me again, look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am, or what I mean;
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first, keep encouraged;
Missing me one place, search another;
I stop somewhere, waiting for you.

--Walt Whitman, Song of Myself