It was years ago when I saw your picture posted on the web. And I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It took appreciable moments for me to recognize you as human. I thought I was looking at blackened sticks haphazardly bundled together in the middle of an African village. And there were natives standing around. But no…it was you. And I only suspected that much when my eyes fell upon your face, and I exclaimed, “Is this a man?” I became sure only after I had traced my line of sight from your face to your neck to the rest of you. Only that way could I determine your nature.
Your face wasn’t distorted or thin but was in fact smiling, atop your body which was on all fours on the dusty plain. If I had seen only your face, I would have even thought, “What a handsome face, with not a care in the world on it.”
Oh, but the rest of you! Your limbs and torso had been reduced to sticks. And yet, without shame, you had turned your face to look into the camera and…smiled for the photographer. I wonder if he called out to you in your native tongue, “Say cheese!” How cruel would that have been? You, who hadn’t eaten well for months, could not even digest cheese nor digest the how of: How could anyone so cruelly offer a food word to your starved ears?
It amazed me that you could smile. Why did you do that? How could you do that? Was it your lifelong habit to greet strangers that way? Or did you find the photographer to be a laughable Euro fellow with a grotesquely beery belly? Or was your face paralyzed by hunger into a smile, which was the remnant of you laughing at death?
There’s no way you could be alive now, these years later. I can believe especially now that humans can be reborn in other-than-human form. Since you looked mostly like a stiff assembly of sticks (again, save for that marvelous face), maybe you have come back to us as a Baobob tree. This picture looks like what you might grow into after the passage of many years: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Baobob_tree.jpg
I hope you do.
This tree stands powerful and erect, instead of as you had been: reduced to a crawl.
Oh tell me, how is it that Africa can support such a massive tree, yet cannot support you on your own two feet and the many millions like you?
Two weeks ago, I stopped a decades’ old habit of mine: My daily purchase of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. I got tired of paying a dollar for my daily dose of fascism and untruth. Fascism and untruth fill the air enough as it is, so I don’t need to pay for it. And I won’t. Not any more. And I hope enough people catch on to the idea that they too can act similarly. And enough of us taking these small baby steps can bring an empire to its knees.
I look at people holding their daily paper in a new way now: they are holding the liquefied essence of the corpses of trees. Trees which were better off (for us and for them) alive and thriving. I cannot bear the thought of someday holding your body, pressed into sheets impressed with all those lies.
Steven Searle for US President in 2012
Founder of the Independent Contractors’ Party
“If you can’t bring yourself to make a better world for your own sake or the sakes of your children, do it for the sake of a tree. And you’ll be blessed for that much.”
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