Wired News has published an article regarding the NSA's wiretapping program. You should read it and make sure that news like this remains on the web. If the link no longer works, there's likely a bittorrent version available or I'll post the entire thing here on my blog if need be.
The title above is a link to a USA Today article in which Senator Sessions states that "Good fences make good neighbors." Well, gee, doesn't that sound familiar? Oh yeah, it was from ninth-grade English class when we read Robert Frost's "Mending Wall". All I can say in rebuttal of Senator Sessions is this, "something there is doesn't love a Republican jackass from Alabama."
From the introduction to Good Poems for Hard Times edited by Garrison Keillor.
America is in hard times these days, the beloved country awash to the scuppers in expensive trash, gripped by persistent jitters, politics even more divorced from reality than usual, the levers of power firmly in the hands of a cadre of Christian pirates and bullies whose cynicism is stunning, especially their perversion of the gospel of the Lord to blast the poor and the meek and subvert the tax system in favor of the rich, while public institutions are put into perpetual fiscal crisis, meanwhile newspapers dwindle in sad decline, journalism is lost in the whirlwind of amusement and the hairy hand of the censor reaches out--what mustn't be lost, in this dark time, is the passion of young people for truth and justice and liberty--the spirit that has kept the American porch light lit through dark ages of history--and when this spirit is betrayed by the timid and the greedy and the naive, then we must depend on the poets. American poetry is the truest journalism we have. What your life can be, lived bravely and independently, you can discover in poetry.
