Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time passing Where have all the flowers gone?
Long time ago Where have all the flowers gone?
…When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?
(Where Have All the Flowers Gone, Pete Seeger)
It was just an hour ago, 6:30 in the morning on a chilly, bright Los Angeles morning, (chilly may be an exaggeration as the temperature was only 60…but it IS LA, after all), and upon my return from celebrating the life of my nephew and discovering the love and affection, the impact and inspiration my nephew Josh imparted on his friends and family, my weekend morning ritual of walking our dog Chance had resumed. I was home again, and the one thing about being home in LA early in the morning has always been the usually quiet, calm, almost quaint environment permitted to showcase itself before the maddening mayhem of the mundane excess explodes and LA seems to become one of those sped up videos, blurry and hard to easily watch. Morning in America, a cliche of sorts, the first three words alluding to either doom and gloom, or the possibilities of promise, to finish the statement…had arrived and my dog Chance and I faced it…for him finding a perfect place to poop and pee, and for me a bit of silent thinking, contemplating the consequences or choices that lie ahead. But then, LA started to awaken and the two men who had discovered a warmer back alley to sleep were packing up their ragtag arrangement of bed ware…the lady who always asks if I have some smokes was in search of her morning cigarettes…a man without shoes, a torn raincoat limping and looking through the green, black and blue trash cans lined up on the streets…and the older man with his two shopping carts of belongings, sitting upon the iron-plated bus stop bench, chopped up into three sections, making it uncomfortable for anyone who might need the entire uncomfortable bench as a place to lie flat for the night…I was back home, and slowly but surely, a rush of melancholy, frustration, anger, and disillusionment began to climb from my gut to my throat seeping into my brain…and I, inspire of trying hard to fight it…began to wonder why. And then a song from my hippy days of the ’60s Where Have All the Flowers Gone began playing somewhere in my brain, like a broken record.
On Friday, December, 7, 2018, America, was informed that both Paul Manafort, and Michael Cohen had lied and lied then used newer lies to lie again regarding their involvement with the Russians, the Trump Campaign, the raping of the democracy, and of course to assist Trump in using the United States as his own personal corporation. And on top of all of that, these two men (of course not JUST these two men) did so for their own fame and to enhance their own fortunes. Bad men doing bad things for a man worse than the two of them combined, Donald Trump, have fucked over this nation, and as if it was the weather forecast, and nothing else, this criminal activity was reported, AND…all I could think of was the song Where Have All the Flowers Gone? And oh yeh, when will we ever learn?
