I can’t get this out of my mind.

And yesterday I saw you standing by the river,

And weren’t those tears that filled your eyes?

And all the fish that lay in dirty water dying,

Had they got you hypnotized?

And yesterday I saw you kissing tiny flowers,

But all that lives is born to die.

And so I say to you that nothing really matters,

And all you do is stand and cry.

I don’t know what to say about it,

When all your ears are turned away,

But now’s the time to look and look again at what you see,

Is that the way it ought to stay?

The following is a letter to my (infant) sons that I wrote in longhand in August, 2005 over a period of several days. It ends in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I am typewriting it here for archival purposes.   My intent in writing this was to preserve for them some sense of what occurred in this country as I don’t expect that the history books can or will do it justice.  My other intent was to capture my own emotions at the time, which were not good.

Cross-posted on the Great Orange Satan.

The Trust:

My dear _ and __:

   If you had told me five years ago that this country would have witnessed a contested Presidential election result, resolved only by a Supreme Court which effectively ordered a state to stop counting its votes (arguably in disregard of its own state laws), and exposing, as almost an afterthought, massive voter suppression, a near institutional campaign of racial intimidation, wanton disregard of legitimate ballots, and a manipulative smear campaign waged by the prevailing party culminating in political staffers flown to Florida to physically harass and threaten public officials, I would have thought–“that’s terrible enough, but somehow the nation will get past it, somehow common sense and reason will prevail.”