Where does one go from a world of insanity?
Somewhere on the other side of despair.
Despair comes from all levels of hell. I started out writing this diary today because my youngest daughter said, "why don't you ever write anything about me, Mom?"
Quotations liberally taken from T.S. Eliot - The Family Reunion
more below...
I have written about youngest daughter, or at least diaries that contain
germs of conversations I've had with her. But this time as I sat down to write, I got caught up in a spiderweb of thought about daughters at fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and about being a parent and how parenting can conjure amazing amounts of joy and astounding depths of despair at the same time. Somewhere today, on someone's diary - I've lost track - the notion was stated that we can only truly feel one emotion at a time. I don't believe it. Not after having been a parent. Joy and despair, love and hate, anger and happiness, worry and pride - all these emotions can share the same grudging space in a soul. It's a mix that would be toxic in any container other than a parent's heart.
Hold tight, hold tight, we must insist that the world is what we have always taken it to be.
My lovely daughter on the day of her birth, 1990...
At 14 or 15...
When I look at these pictures that connect a decade and a half - an eternity in a child's life, but so little time, seconds perhaps in a parent's mind, I have another image in mind right now due to recent uncovered events.
All that I can hope to make you understand
Is only events: not what has happened.
The image of despair. There are parents out there whose children are dead and murdered, everywhere, parents alongside their child in death, rapes and murders, armed robbery that ends in fatalities, accidents on freeways and country roads that kill our children, drugs to harm, people to lure them out of their safe havens; but tonight I'm in a mood to indict all our injust and asinine actions as a country right now and I want to bring up this child...Abeer Qasim Hamza al-Janabi:
The circle of our understanding
Is a very restricted area.
Tell me again why we are there?
Tell me our allies don't do the same damn things and why our country continues to foster an environment where torture is de rigeur for a "democratic" nation, nay, even encouraged by our Commander in Chief, especially with his most recent nomination...
Harper's list of torture
see also:
DOD general counsel who recommends torture...
What Torture means to us
and tell me why acts of retaliation and precision strikes produce excusable collateral damage (give me a fucking break; there are no "smart bombs" - they all kill mindlessly):
You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it.
You only know what it is not to hope...
Tell me we don't use radioactive depleted uranium artillery that kills and then leaves a gift that keeps on giving to their country and our soldiers in the form of birth defects and high cancer rates. And we do nothing to change this.
Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on U.S. depleted uranium
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you
Tell me we don't blast dollars away in the sand without accountability and then let our veterans live homeless on the streets of our cities without recourse to federal aid or assistance. Tell me again that we take care of our own.
What a fucking lie.
Homeless Shelters Getting Iraq Vets
You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you,
Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless
Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.
Tell me that there is joy in Iraq.
Tell me that there is despair in the White House.
Dover AFB gallery
Of the past you can only see what is past,
Not what is always present. That is what matters.
Sorry, kiddo, the diary about you will have to be written another day.
Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur.
"The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived." - Petronius