Today’s New York Times front page above-the-fold announces: Aftershocks Jolt Katmandu, and “Everyone Is Scared” and Drought Frames Economic Divide of Californians: Will the Rich Cut Back?
I wondered how these side by side news stories could even coexist on the same page and if the editors at the Times did this on purpose. In art school we use the term juxtapose. Another above-the-fold headline reads: “Nepal, Known for Its Toughness And Disarray, Is Seriously Tested”
In the same morning the radio listed all the UNESCO sites and demolition of cultural centers, the economics of tourists staying away — the reverberating depth of this earthquake. Now the toll is up to 3,800 dead. For the moment I chose to read about the rich in California keeping their swimming pools full while the poor cut back on baths to afford their soaring water bills. Everyone fears fires so then I wonder why people stay in California. Then I remember that I’m a transplant in New England, but Maine doesn’t feel like whatever I believed New England was, and when home is home, it’s just that. Home. So why should they leave. The end the article states that about 80% of the water in the state is used by agriculture, so I think back to the Red River Valley where we don’t use irrigation, but when I lived in Arizona the fields were flooded on schedule, even the lawns in Tempe had built-up ‘berms’, mounds surrounding the edges of properties so that the bi-monthly flooding would stay in the yard. I’d find small pink dead crabs in the St. Augustine grass after the water soaked in, wondering how far they’d traveled.
I thought of empathy and how misunderstood for narcissism it can be to ‘put yourself in someone else’s shoes’. So the dog got her handful of pills, I took her for a walk after trying to get her to eat (no luck), and now, getting back from the woods I have a list of things to get done today, Monday.
Under-the-fold is G.O.P. Struggling With Shifts on Gay Marriage. I’m guessing John Stewart guest wrote the first paragraph. Surreal and Absurd are my words of the moment.
Apologies if I am misunderstood as taking any of these issues lightly when actually, it’s the opposite.
margo halverson 