“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
You Can Listen Here Murder creates pure chaos. It smashes life’s normal, forward progression — it eliminates continuity. It annihilates our belief in the reasonableness of the world — it assaults faith. It is the visitation of the monstrous to our safe havens. Mass murder expands that chaos to a degree profligate and virulent. Its consequences never stop. Generation after generation, its heirs will recall the names of the dead and the story of murder’s […]
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You Can Listen Here Saturday, June 17, 1815: Precisely two hundred year ago today, on a cold, wet morning, Martha Deacon, nine months pregnant, “wandered with three small children through the [British] army’s bivouacs”* in the village of Genappe, very close to the Belgian hamlet of Waterloo. She was searching for her husband, Thomas Deacon, an Ensign in the 73rd Highland Battalion. Going into battle at the crossroads of Quatre-Bras, he had left her […]
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You Can Listen Here One crow, the same crow, marked by a gap in his left wing, appears alone in the early morning and shows me the trick he has taught himself. Without any lookout from his extended family, risking the Cooper who hunts this turf, he bobs and weaves across the lawn until he is under the caged suet. He looks up. He rises to the cage in less than a blink, effortlessly, […]
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You Can Listen Here I have lived in the country long enough to know the sound. The clattering at my back told me what was coming. An air-conditioned tractor, toxic green,12 feet high, drawing a harrow, its blades dusty and sharp. After it passed, I stepped into the road and watched it turn to the fields. I heard the harrow drop and the scraping, rock-cracking cutting begin. For five hours it made pass […]
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