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A Parable of Springtime (short version)  | | Ben Heine / MWC NEWS |
Listen up. I'm out jogging in the blooming countryside when I round this bend and what do I see? There's a newborn calf in a ditch. You've never seen such a little calf. Black as leftover night. I look around, wondering where's Mama, and I hear this big moo. I look up, and standing not 70 feet away on this steep hillside, is the cow that dropped the calf. That baby's entered the world, plop, rolled down the hill, underneath the fence, and there she lies. In the ditch, not a mark on her. Eyes wide open. And I'm thinking, hey, she's going to be all right. She'll figure out how to stand up, then climb out of that ditch. What an amazing thing. A new, um, sentient being, opening her eyes just in time to get tumbled downhill, all dizzy, not knowing her head from her butt, only to hit bottom and look around.
Then, get this. She starts trying to climb out of the ditch. Well, she gets a little help from the owner, an old white-bearded man who rolls by in a rusty old Chevy pickup, gets out and lifts her up under the forelegs and heaves her into the truck bed easy as pie. He smiles real friendly at his prize, thanks me for nothing, says, "Its such as this that gives me hope." We share a laugh or two, he drives off, I wave to big Mama, standing there in the woods, then I'm off jogging down the road again. When my house swims into view, I turn my mind to the column I've got to write this morning, and that gets me to thinking on how blind we've all been. And I'm thinking about how many folks in media have been afraid to talk about certain issues because Congress wouldn't look into anything when the Republicans controlled it. And how the Democrats used to not stand up to them from fear of being called unpatriotic. And I'm thinking how this country's been rolling downhill fast for years, and how we won't have a clue which way is up until we hit bottom. But then I'm thinking maybe we've already hit bottom, and we're all waking up to find ourselves in a ditch, but at least we aren't blind, right? In a sense we're being reborn. As I jog past the azaleas and a big yellow iris that survived the late frost, I begin to count all the reasons we have to celebrate. We're waking up! Signs are everywhere. Rep. Henry Waxman holds hearings into the big lies about Pat Tillman, the football hero shot dead in Afghanistan by one or more fellow soldiers. And Jessica Lynch testifies how the military and media tried making her out to be some kind of Davy Crockett hero for getting banged around and busted up in that convoy in Iraq. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court rules that the EPA has authority to regulate greenhouse gasses, speaking of which, big business and lots of states are not waiting on the Bush administration any longer. They're coming up with their own plans against global warming. Maybe it helped that Al Gore's movie, "An Inconvenient Truth" won Oscars. Now it looks like Complex 2030, that stinker of a plan to build new nukes—is losing support in Congress. Meanwhile, Dennis Kucinich introduces a bill to impeach Cheney. It'll never fly, most likely, but at least it gins up the historical record and puts Congress on the spot. Congress sets a timetable for leaving Iraq, adding pressure to leave the genocidal conflict there in a war the country no longer supports. We're at a tipping point, like Gore says. The tide's turning on all fronts. Donald Rumsfeld is long since gone at Defense. George Tenet at CIA. Scooter Libby at Cheney's office. Alberto Gonzales is about to get fired at Justice, ditto Paul Wolfowitz at the World Bank. Condoleezza Rice is likely going to be calling on Congress soon to explain how those 16 little words about Saddam's so-called nuke program got into Bush's State of the Union Address in 2003. Among Bush's foreign supporters, Tony Blair's stepping down in England, and it looks like Olmert could follow soon in Israel. Last month Bill Moyers comes on PBS and points out how Billy Kristol, George Will, Judith Miller, Richard Perle, Charles Krauthammer, Thomas Friedman and people like that parroted phony stories that got us into war. Moyers is asking the same thing I've asked: What the heck are these talking heads still doing on TV, as if they had a clue? And get this: responsible people are looking into whether Bush stole Ohio in the last election? So what's not to celebrate? Say what you will about the Democrats, but we'd still be rolling downhill, dizzy and clueless if they hadn't won back Congress. Now people are telling the truth. Not all the truth, sure, but some of it, and that's opening doors to more of it. Admittedly, it's a long ways from having your eyes opened, to standing up and taking charge of your own survival, but I'll save such news is for another day. Let's celebrate the rebirth going on around us.
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 Don Williams a contributing editor at MWC is a widely published columnist, short story writer, and the founding editor and publisher of New Millennium Writings, an annual literary anthology...
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