It is difficult to be cheery in this beginning of a new year. It seemed as if many of the poems which I received during the past month reflected that same difficulty.

The monstrous wave fictionalized in movies happened for real in an area of the world which had not thought it important enough to spend money on underwater earthquake sensors. The toll of the dead reaches 150,000.

After church this morning, several of us were talking about it and then reminding ourselves that the AIDS crisis in Africa is killing even more people, orphaning a generation of children, and is being given scant lip service by the monied nations. And the refugee camps in Darfur house people in equally dire straits.

The U.S. preemptive war in Iraq has killed over 100,000 Iraqis, a conservative estimate by British health officials, pushing on to 1500 American soldiers dead, and over 10,000 wounded in body, not counting every soldier that has come into contact with the dust of depleted uranium and is now carrying that poison in their bodies, and countless others wounded in soul.

We live with the knowledge that the leadership of the United States is in the hands of men and women who find torture to be a good thing, as is militarizing the police and policizing the military, and knowing that they defrauded enough voters and enough voting machines to win the election.

We live with the knowledge that every administrative staff person in every federal department bows to the corporate gods and rewrites regulations to eviscerate every environmental safeguard on the records. And Bush fiddles as polar icecaps melt and Antarctic iceshelves are breaking up into iceburgs that float to New Zealand, an apparently exceeding rare occurrence in the past.

Where is that "shirker" who hasn't yelled "Yopp" with the rest of us? Because the many of us who care about all of this are not being heard. Are not being allowed to be heard.

What will it take?

Cherie

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