I would like to focus on my current attempts to redesign lorenwebster.net, which currently is simply a truncated copy of In a Dark Time that was accidentally set up when I transferred my site to a new ISP provider. Doing so, for me at least, entails learning how to use Macromedia’s Fireworks, Dreamweaver, and Flash because I’m not willing to simply patch together a new site using an outdated version of Adobe GoLive.
Truthfully, I’m looking forward to creating a number of new photo-essays using Flash, and I’m using the redesign of lorenwebster.net to force me to start learning skills I will need later.
I’ve also begun Robert Lax’s book of poems entitled Love Had a Compass, but I’m constantly being distracted by the latest stories coming out of Iraq, and an accompanying state of depression
Lately I’ve found myself listening more and more to old Jackson Browne records, particularly:
LIVES IN THE BALANCE
I’ve been waiting for something to happen
For a week or a month or a year
With the blood in the ink of the headlines
And the sound of the crowd in my ear
You might ask what it takes to remember
When you know that you’ve seen it before
Where a government lies to a people
And a country is drifting to war
There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who send the guns
To the wars that are fought in places
Where their business interest runs
On the radio talk shows and the T.V.
You hear one thing again and again
How the U.S.A. stands for freedom
And we come to the aid of a friend
But who are the ones that we call our friends–
These governments killing their own?
Or the people who finally can’t take any more
And they pick up a gun or a brick or a stone
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
There’s a shadow on the faces
Of the men who fan the flames
Of the wars that are fought in places
Where we can’t even say the names
They sell us the President the same way
They sell us our clothes and our cars
They sell us every thing from youth to religion
The same time they sell us our wars
I want to know who the men in the shadows are
I want to hear somebody asking them why
They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are
But they’re never the ones to fight or to die
And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire
Do you think Jackson forsaw the Bush administration in 1986 when he wrote the lines “There’s a shadow on the faces/ Of the men who send the guns/ To the wars that are fought in places/ Where their business interest runs” ?
Do you think he foresaw the latest Israeli attempts to “disengage” from Gaza when writing “There are people under fire/ There are children at the cannons/ And there is blood on the wire.”
Worst of all is this dreadful sense of deja vu, this feeling this is just one more turn of the crushing wheel of life, despite our best efforts, none of this will ever change, the innocent, and not-so-innocent will continue to die while others continue to cash in on their misery.