What Do You See?
It is Friday, midwinter. Out of the window here at Starbucks the sky is unrelieved gray, much salty damp asphalt, and concrete curbing. The architecture of our way of life is designed to accommodate the automobile. Automobiles, now cybernetic platforms, often cost as much as our parents paid for a house. Trees, shrubs, grass are severely encroached by suburban sprawl. In the city of course, its much worse.
Like everyone else I have thought of money as a medium of exchange for buying and selling. Money–necessary, convenient, efficient, morally neutral. My understanding is changing. Everything around me is more costly than a past generation could have imagined. My friends, baristas work behind the counter. They work feverishly, at a frenzy for extended periods of time –like soldiers in line of battle, under assault, driven to survive. Of course nothing of this scene provokes reflection,–all is accepted as the “natural” way of things, the given.
Wendell Berry’s poetry prompts me to think differently.
III Look Out
Verse 3
Come to your windows, people of the world,
look out at whatever you see wherever you are,
and you will see dancing upon it that shadow.
You will see that your place, wherever it is,
your house, your garden, your shop, your forest, your farm,
bears the shadow of its destruction by war
which is the economy of greed which is plunder
which is the economy of wrath which is fire.
The lords of war sell the earth to buy fire,
they sell the water and air of life to buy fire.
They are little men grown great by willingness
to drive whatever exists into its perfect absence.
Their intention to destroy any place is solidly founded
upon their willingness to destroy every place.By Wendell Berry — Sabbaths 2003
