In the Meantime,

Happenings May 26, 2022 – From AZ

Eliot and Millay told us April is dangerous, but I think May is even more so.  Up in Michigan the weather whipsaws between cold and hot, rains pour every other day, stripping the dogwood and the flowering crab of their blossoms moments after they bloom. We already had our first tornado.  In Arizona the heat, which stayed away at least at night, now lingers long past dark.  Only those who rouse before five can go outside for any length of time.  

We humans join in, of course.  This year we sullied April with the portent of reversing women’s rights by fifty years.  And now in May we stripped the blossoms of Texas in the fabled hail of bullets.  Outrage and horror are again our companions, “thoughts and prayers” the recurring dialogue in a play that seems never to end.  Or is it now a liturgy, a phrase in a macabre rosary?

The solution is not easy, even we who think that assault weapons have no place in civilian life.  Bans and laws will not fix it, though it certainly will do more than “thoughts and prayers.”  No, the roots of this grand guignol are deep and wide, entangled with a history that is enthralled by violence and intoxicated by grandiose dreams that are out of reach for all but a few.  

The horror of Uvalde is the social equivalent of a heart attack; symptom of disease not cause.  It can be treated, but unless the patient changes their lifestyle, it will come again.  How many such ‘heart attacks’ will it take before we realize the answer is living differently?  I certainly do not know.  

Rarely have I chewed the scenery in this little column.  I do apologize. It should be for uplift and such, but at this moment uplift is hollow, whistling past another schoolyard turned graveyard.  – FW