Strong Words by William Stafford

Strange but life isn’t serious anymore. Oh, people get incensed about issues, about atrocities that flare in the news, about the long, grinding subjugation of women. We are alert for such topics. But the more we perceive, the more we destroy our sense of the immediate value of living. Now we tell each other that death is better than oppression. Then, we value life too much for such frivolous opinions.

Today popular magazines pour consumer solaces endlessly, but their articles and stories are about lives that are shallow, desperate, banal, blighted. And the public wander from one distraction to another, carrying their emptiness within them: “I acquiesce in the deterrent of terror. I am preserved by my readiness to kill them all.”