He Folded His Fear Into

What's A Country? It's Just An Administrative Unit, A Glorified Municipality. Why Do We Imbue It With Esoteric Meaning And Protect It With Nuclear Bombs? I Can't Bow Down To A Municipality... It's Just Not Intelligent. The Bastards Will Do What They Have To Do, And We'll Do What We Have To Do. Even If They Annihilate Us, We'll Go Down On The Other Side.

What Sort Of Love Is This Love That We Have For Countries? What Sort Of Country Is It That Will Ever Live Up To Our Dreams? What Sort Of Dreams Were These That Have Been Broken? Isn't The Greatness Of Great Nations Directly Proportionate To Their Ability To Be Ruthless, Genocidal? Doesn't The Height Of A Country's 'success' Usually Also Mark The Depths Of Its Moral Failure?

They All Broke The Rules. They All Crossed Into Forbidden Territory. They All Tampered With The Laws That Lay Down Who Should Be Loved And How. And How Much. The Laws That Make Grandmothers Grandmothers, Uncles Uncles, Mothers Mothers, Cousins Cousins, Jam Jam, And Jelly Jelly. It Was A Time When Uncles Became Fathers, Mothers Lovers, And Cousins Died And Had Funerals. It Was A Time When The Unthinkable Became Thinkable And The Impossible Really Happened.

It Is Curious How Sometimes The Memory Of Death Lives On For So Much Longer Than The Memory Of The Life That It Purloined. Over The Years, As The Memory Of Sophie Mol ... Slowly Faded, The Loss Of Sophie Mol Grew Robust And Alive. It Was Always There. Like A Fruit In Season. Every Season. As Permanent As A Government Job.

I Do Believe That Fundamental To Any Real Hope Is That We Do Need To Reconstitute What Has Been Generally Handed Out As The Recipe For "happiness" For The Human Race, And What Has Generally Been Decided Counts As "progress." People Arrive At A Different Understanding Of Happiness, However Fragile It Is. They Find It In Unexpected Ways, In The Most Unexpected Of Places.