AlMoSt DoNe WiTh DrIvEwAy NoW

LeTtInG ofF sTeAm!

l have to say something about the Virginia Tech. shootings. My oldest son, D is just finishing his first year in the residence halls (engineering of all things) and my daughter, M leaves this September to do her first year at university too. This tragedy has hit close to home for me- it’s been all over the news and l am having such a hard time getting my head around it all- doubt l ever will. These students, still so young, leaving home to make something of themselves- and you think your children are safe- especially on campus!
Everyone is talking about forgiveness for this young man but all l seem to feel is anger. Anger not at him- but at what was done - but for the damage done that spawns such monstrous atrocities to emerge in our youth. How could he, why??? I saw a brief picture of his room. l think of my son’s cramped shoebox of a room and how he manages. What happened to this kid- why do these killers model themselves on film/game characters? It’s madness- all of it. The way l see it is that this lad wanted to commit suicide and he wasn’t going alone. How can it be so easy for a our young to become armed with the knife and the gun and to use them with cynical indifference or psychopathic madness. What kind of society have we created to so fester the minds of a young generation? Bred on a diet that makes them assume that what they want they have - and now - without effort or thanks, we increasingly see the streets of our towns and cities the battleground for marauding gangs of young people with little hope or sense of opportunity. Enticed into drink and drugs with a fragile sense of values, their reality becomes at odds with the rest of society and increasing alienation leads the extremes into little better than a feral lifestyle. The ASBO is worn as some ‘red badge of courage’. We have engendered a dependence culture that encourages young people to assume that there is always a safety net, always a handout and responsibility is someone else’s problem. I read on the news of a 12 year old boy performing a filmed beheading, teenagers brainwashed into becoming suicide bombers, a gang beating and knifing a lone teenager to death and a young American student cold bloodedly shooting fellow students. Nourished by a childhood of violent television and computer games, music that parades sex and violence cheaply, and a news representation of the world that revels in the violent and the corrupt, is it little surprise that some speak of this generation of teenagers as ‘the lost generation’. Civilization we would boast – by what definition?? Tragedy the Virginia shootings were for sure but, even greater is the tragedy of what we are doing to our youth. I would not be a teenager in these days, fear for my own and thank God they are surviving it. I’m rambling here but still feel angry and so utterly heartbroken for the families who lost their loved ones.
I know it’s not a simple matter of events but am just so shocked.

tWo Of ThE sAmE

Country dance by Norman MacCaig

The room whirled and coloured
and figured itself with dancers.
Another gaiety seemed born of theirs
and flew like streamers
between their heads and the ceiling.

I gazed, coloured and figured,
down the tunnel of streamers —
and there, in the band, an old fiddler
sawing away in the privacy
of music. He bowed lefthanded and his right hand
was the wrong way round. Impossible.
But the jig bounced, the gracenotes
sparkled on the surface of the tune.
The odd man out, when it came to music,
was the odd man in.

There's a lesson here, I thought, climbing
into the pulpit I keep in my mind.
But before I'd said Firstly brethren, the tune
ended, the dancers parted, the old fiddler
took a cigarette from the pianist, stripped off
the paper and chewed the tobacco

ThE dELiVeRy aRrIvEs