Hope

I've been busier than I like to be of late, and I don't see any signs of that lifting. I noticed that it's been a week since I posted, which is way too long. Apologies to those who come here often hoping to read a little something that gives you grist for your thought mill. Let's see what I can do as I get ready for work.

There have been a few daunting things that have bothered me personally recently. I of course, wish Cindy Sheehan's mom wouldn't have been taken ill and hope for her speedy recovery. I'd love to have seen Cindy been able to stay on in Crawford and keep up the good fight. She's done what she's got to do, and there are increasing numbers of veterans and their families who have arrived at Camp Casey, so at least the work continues.

What I don't like is some of the rhetoric that's flying around. I watched an interview with Mark Williams--yet another far right wingnut radio host. He's just returned from Iraq and he's full of himself, full of bluster (and full of something smelling quite unlike bluster). He's going to take a convoy of buses to Crawford in his YOU DON'T SPEAK FOR ME CINDY tour.

I don't like this stuff. It moves beyond the protest standpoint to the let's cause a confrontation standpoint, or the let's inspire the idiot weirdos standpoint. As we found out with Larry Northern when he ran over hundreds of crosses and American flags at Camp Casey, the uber-patriotic can be inspired to idiocy in their fervor. And when I listened to the Mark Williams interview on MSNBC, it was full of that blinded-by-their-own-rhetoric bluster that is about as ugly as it is energetic.

Extreme vanity + extreme energy=trouble.

As I was walking in downtown San Antonio the other day, I came across one of those hip-high bushes full of the canary yellow flowers. They're called Esperanza, which is the Spanish word for hope. I don't know the history of why the bush was named esperanza, but I speculate this: in the absolute heat of summer, when just getting through the day is a major effort in South Texas, there is a bush that inspires such hope...such a sense that we'll all persevere and overcome that which is now so difficult.

So I offer that to you in a time where the words are flying too fast, with too much passion and too little sense...that we'll get through this, the temperatures will fall and the seasons will bring soothing change. Esperanza. Hope.