/Credit: Robert Jordan
Politics
You can begin a hike arguing about neoliberalism, trying to figure out what it means, and after you have listened to your husband tell you about the Whigs and the Federalists, and Britain in the nineteenth century, and Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, and civil rights, and Clinton and the injustices of NAFTA, and the original meaning of liber, free, what that might mean in terms of generosity and open-mindedness certainly not operative at present when Scott Pruitt just became head of the EPA—goodbye EPA, goodbye wolves and bears, goodbye redwoods, goodbye tribal lands, goodbye water, goodbye air, goodbye the tattered remnants of life as it should be lived on earth, goodbye goodbye godbye, god be with you shattered forests, god be with you toxic waters, god be with you small anguishes, starved bent & twisted lives, the reasons for grief are nearly infinite—after you have listened you can both fall silent as you walk with this man you love, and notice the downed and leafless trees, the ant trails, which are lines of sifted dirt that cross the path heading from spiky dried reeds to more spiky dried reeds, notice an anthill climbing all the way to the top of a clump of daffodils that grow off the trail in a weedy field, choking and killing the flowers with its thousands-of-tiny-bodies formic acid, and looking up, acknowledge silently that there is a white-bellied hawk, yes, wheeling and calling above the pine trees keee-ir keee-ir almost like a cat, and fleecy clouds that presage rain on what is still a sweet morning, and there are frogs hiccupping and spring peepers shrilling, invisible, somewhere around the lke, and all around you are tiny insects, the sun hitting their wings, like translucent diminutive angels.
Continue reading «Ann Fisher-Wirth: Politics // Winter Day on the Whirlpool Trails /»
