"Baby Suggs grew tired, went to bed and stayed there until her big old heart quit. Except for an occasional request for color she said practically nothing--until the afternoon of the last day of her life when she got out of bed, skipped slowly to the door of the keeping room and announced to Sethe and Denver the lesson she had learned from her sixty years a slave and ten years free: that there was no bad luck in the world but white people. "They don't know when to stop." she said, and returned to her bed, pulled up the quilt and left them to hold that thought forever." --Toni Morrison, Beloved
Some things, like Toni Morrison's words
Just take your breath away.
You think you've heard it all...
Read it all...and then
Suddenly,
You see something so striking
Your lungs collapse
In pain.
In those moments,
Between reckless gulps for air,
You wonder
How often can that happen?
How often can you be
Shocked and smashed,
Routed to tears,
And torn to rage?
Not often you think,
Because you've become inured
Obdurate,
Casehardened to the evil world,
Confirmed as a skeptic
On the sly nature
Of many a human heart...
And then suddenly
Just when you thought you were free and clear
Of blame and censure and ferocious feeling...
Along comes something
That rips cool comfort away.
The other day
I ambled across
page 1 of
Howard Zinn's
"A People's History of the United States"
And had my sweet air
Once again
Horsewhipped out of me:
After such moments
In amped tones
You may hear yourself again say:
Damn you dirty devils!"And to think,
They celebrate this ancient miscreant's
Rancid racism
Annually with a holiday.
But then...
You whitewash your ire away,
Because after all that was 500 years ago.
And so...
You rest your rage and relax.
Because you think
The devil is gone out of white people now.
After all,
They've learned a lot
About being human
And Christian
In the interim...
And then, just then--
You hear something
In a big-bang nuclear nanosecond...
That totally strips
You of air
And shatters you
Of your precious wind of charity.
Something that makes you wish
That the white devil
Had but one neck...
So that you might cut it off.
On
NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday
Dina Temple-Raston,
Author of
Justice on the Grass,
Was interviewed
By Neal Conan.
She's a brilliant speaker.
And her 16 minutes are filled with
Several massive
Trillon-ton ethical explosions.
The main one of which
I transcribe for you here.
But first,
Bear in mind
Some atrocious facts
That you cannot possibly
Hold in your lungs for long--
That in 1994,
In 100 Rwandan days
800,000 breaths
Expired.
Why?
Well because:
"The truth is Hutus and Tutsis are not two different tribes. They're descendants of the same ancestors. And they have the same religion. They have the same language. They intermarry. Hutus is actually a word that means slave in Kinyarwanda.
So it was really a caste system. And it was a caste system that was developed by the Belgians in the 1900s. They basically didn't want to administer Rwanda. They didn't want to use Belgian resources. So they put the Tutsis in charge as a divide and conquer idea. And then handed out cards and said:
'Okay how thin is your nose? Oh if your nose is thin then you are a Tutsis.'
'What color is your skin? Oh if your skin is dark we deem you a Hutus.'
And by issuing these cards they basically codified a system that didn't really exist before they got there. If you seen Hotel Rwanda or Sometime in April you'll see when people go to the roadblocks where they were often killed during the genocide, they were asked for their identity cards. It was these cards that the Belgian gave them, this artificial, sort of construct, that lead to the death of many Tutsis" --Dina Temple-Raston
That is a phenomenal passage.
An absolute nuclear bomb.
An ethical sin
That dims day.
How thin is your nose?
If you skin is dark...
We deem you a Tutsis.
Creating artificial divisions?
Do white people have
Any moral authority
On this planet at all?
Any?
At all?
Hold that thought please.
Forever.
Update (4/09/05 @ 3:22 PM Tucson time):My timing is freaky sometimes:
Tens of thousands of supporters of a militant Shiite cleric filled central Baghdad's streets Saturday and demanded that American soldiers go home, marking the second anniversary of Baghdad's fall with shouts of "No, no to Satan!"You think they think--
We've got
All the moral authority of the devil?
In other words: 
Since all the world's 
"And Michelangelo entered on his ninth decade, and worked, as an artist, under his ninth Pope. 