ANIMAL FARM REDUX

It appears that we are revisiting George Orwell's Animal Farm. You will recall in this story, the farm animals revolt and take over the farm. At first everybody pitches in and d0 their best to make the farm work, but before long the pigs gain control and take over not only the farm, but the lives and activities of all the other animals as well. As time progresses, the pigs increase their control, move into the farm house, and began to take on the behaviors, dress, and appearance of the humans they had helped oust. Before the story ends, it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the pigs now running the farm and the humans from whom it had been wrested.

Take a look at what's happening now in our so-called war on terror. We are busily engaged in a needless war in Iraq, killing as many Iraqis, not to mention Americans, as we can, destroying their infrastructure, putting their people out of work, invading their homes and killing their children. In addition, we've adopted the imprisonment and interrogation techniques of terrorism, locking up anybody at will without an pretense of cause and without any recourse to due process, subjecting them to tortures that throughout our history we have abhorred and refused to practice. At home we subject our own people to endless surveillance and suspicion and pervert political principles that have served us so well for over 200 years from tools of freedom to tools of oppression.

All of this makes me think we've taken a wrong turn and ourselves become the enemy we initially set out to overcome. We are a terrorist nation now. All other countries quake at the thought of what we might do to them if they thwart our interests, or if they even question why we're doing all the horrible things we do.

BRYANT IN THE PARK (NOT)

"To him who in the love of nature holds / Communion with her visible forms, she speaks / A various language; . . . ("Thanatopsis"). But to the perambulating patrons of the park where I walk my dog, she is often not heard at all. An unpleasantly large number of park walkers leave their dogs behind and bring their cell phones instead. It is amazing and offputting to see people who ostensibly go into the woods to escape the hubble and bubble of urban and suburban existence, oblivious to the trees and the birds and the sunshine around them, still clinging mindlessly to their cell phones and wrapped in conversation with some disembodied voice far away. Where is the present, the moment? What is the point of coming to the park but to leave behind the artificiality of our too electronic lives? After all, Nature is the missing reality to most of us. We spend our days in an environment were we walk from our concrete driveways, to concrete parking lots at the workplace, shopping center, theatre, school, church, or other place we visit, without once setting foot on the actual ground, the earth in which we have our sustenance. In paving over the surface of our planet we have obliterated an important part of the real world; by taking a cell phone or other electronic contrivance everywhere we go, we change the remaining fragments of that world to a soulless virtual reality.

What has happened to the poet in us?