Hard Rain

It was the fall of 2004, when Ron and I heard Eleanor's sixth-grade band begin to stomp their feet and clap their hands--stomp, stomp, clap! stomp, stomp, clap!--that we became aware that what we thought of as the rebellious songs of our adolescence had been fully taken over by elevators and middle school band directors.

Then, in the spring of 2008, we realized that it wasn't enough to be relieved when our kids weren't assigned to the creationist middle school science teacher, that we should have protested the first time we heard about him giving handouts about how dinosaurs and humans lived at the same time and then collecting the handouts at the end of each class so parents wouldn't see them.

Now it's 2011, and 17 degrees outside. I've been thinking of going out to one of the two stores in town looking for a bouquet of cut flowers to help me bear having to take down the Christmas decorations. But I'm not sure I'm up to the whole ordeal--a parking place far enough away from the door that I'll have room to extend my stiff leg into the frozen slush to get out of the car, cheery smiles for the people I pass, soft muzak on the store speakers, displays of the headline in the local paper about three murders near the lake we like to frequent in warmer weather...it might all be too much.

It's like this poem, "Hard Rain," by Tony Hoagland:

After I heard It's a Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall
played softly by an accordion quartet
through the ceiling speakers at the Springdale Shopping Mall,
I understood: there's nothing
we can't pluck the stinger from,

nothing we can't turn into a soft-drink flavor or a t-shirt.
Even serenity can become something horrible
if you make a commercial about it
using smiling, white-haired people

quoting Thoreau to sell retirement homes
in the Everglades, where the swamp has been
drained and bulldozed into a nineteen-hold golf course
with electrified alligator barriers.

"You can't keep beating yourself up, Billy,"
I heard the therapist say on television
to the teenage murderer,
"about all those people you killed--
You just have to be the best person you can be,
one day at a time--"

And everybody in the audience claps and weeps a little,
because the level of deep feeling has been touched,
and they want to believe that
the power of Forgiveness is greater
than the power of Consequence, or History.

Dear Abby:
My father is a businessman who travels.
Each time he returns from one of his trips,
his shoes and trousers
are covered with blood--
but he never forgets to bring me a nice present.
Should I say something?
Signed, America

I used to think I was not part of this,
that I could mind my own business and get along,

but that was just another song
that had been taught to me since birth--

whose words I was humming under my breath,
as I was walking through the Springdale Mall.

I like the line about how "the level of deep feeling has been touched" because it seems to me to get right to the heart of the matter--what business is it of yours if my deep feeling is wrongly bestowed? Who gets to define "wrong" and why? Is there such a thing as evil, and if so, can I point my finger at a person and say that there's no more room for forgiveness, that he's already "History"?

Well, yeah. Not only can I, but I probably should. Although it would be a dreadful world if everybody stalked around showing their true feelings every day (no more of what Holden Caulfield calls "phoniness"), maybe one thing January is for is facing some of the gritty realities that get covered over with lovely growing things during the rest of the year.

Hmm, I'm not the only one thinking like this today; see this xkcd.