Having grown up living my life in the Rocky Mountains I have acquired an instinctive respect and fear of a drought ravaged forest in the fall of the year.  One can smell the dryness of the forest and its fuels.  Instinctively you want to tread lightly for a single spark could ignite a beast of a fire that could ravage the landscape.  Anyone, even a fool, backs away and prays for nature to take her course and snows like the dickens.

Right now living in America our cultures, political and otherwise, are in another form of drought teetering on the edge of conflagration. Anyone can sense that in the papers, on internet, bar, restaurant, and streets. We seem to have rained expensive guns and ammunition across the land, each weapon a snubbed cigarette thrown out the window on the parched forest floor. We have the critical police forces every city needs, but have added a brand new overfunded shadow army operating on the margins of law seeding rage and fear in the culture. As this late fall drought of both reason and kindness pushes us to ignition, we also have verbal arsonists dividing us and using their media, fallacious rhetoric, and political power to stoke the oxygen of rage. Perhaps they didn’t grow up on a farm, in a forest, or on a ranch surviving on dry land grazing.  Some of our leadership in Washington either know nothing of nature or they are intentional cultural arsonists.  When church reader boards promoting peace and kindness are riddled with bullets you might say the end of peace, even this restless peace, is near. You don’t wear hobnailed boots in a dry forest and you don’t send the metal of a military force into a tense city to inspire peace. It appears to this writer the leadership is using figurative molotov cocktails to accelerate the danger in the a bone dry forest called America

Modest Proposal for Good

Nature teaches.  I learned living in New Mexico the ancient knowledge of two kinds of rain; Male and Female. The Male rain is water pissing out of the sky an inch an hour at a time.  In a Male rain out goes the fire but also the top soil and everything that was once on the banks of your of little stream and community.  The Female rains is fine drops, occurring over long stretches of time, soaking roots, softening top soil, and reviving the tinsel thin weeds. The rivers rise in a Female rain but do not flood their banks. In these useless cuture wars we need to rain kindness slowly in all we do and say in America. It is not like there is a choice.  Metallic rage will destroy us, our children and their future. If you are making your living on the economy of rage you are part of the problem.  Rage and anger are humanity’s cheapest and most dangerous emotions.  Please rethink your strategy in resisting today’s crop of cultural arsonists in Washington and across the nation. That would be good. A spark is a spark  in a dry forest no matter who ignites it.