‘Kids Who Die’

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Not many writers compose laments or lamentations in 2015. Perhaps we need some. There is no specific metrical form for a lament, no rhyme scheme; there are no rules. How would one know when one has written one? A lament is meant to be sung or declaimed, and even though we listen to many singers and even though we hear too many speech-makers, the poetry that most of us encounter is read silently, nodded at, and then forgotten after the encounter. Too often, Americans seem to think of poetry as bloodless, intellectual.

A lament is an expression of grief captured in the moment or as close to the moment as it can be caught. Those who were left behind, those who do not want to imagine one more moment continuing to live on as someone left behind, they sing laments. As non-subtle as our culture can often be, “get over it” is just as often a guiding outlook. For most of us, life rarely if ever brings us to experiences so sad we proclaim we will never cease mourning, and when we do, we try to cheer each other up. Lamentations present meaning in mourning. We don’t often linger there long enough for meaning to germinate.
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Defending Abuse Creates Abuse

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The officer was acquitted. He had shot and injured the driver of a car. He was acquitted and restored to his police force.

The officer claimed he had been hit by the car and knocked to the ground. He had fired in self-defense, heroically. There was a video of the incident, though, and it showed no such thing. The video showed that he remained standing as the car moved past him, not even at a car-like speed, and he fired point-blank at the driver on the driver’s side. The driver was not badly injured. The officer was arrested for assault, and he was also arrested for fabricating evidence.

The prosecutor said on the record at the time that if officers can get away with shooting people and lying about it, “the system is doomed.” The officer’s own lawyer recently told The New York Times, “There was no way around it—he (the officer) was dead wrong.” The two lead lawyers on both sides agree: The officer had lied about the incident. He was wrong. But he was acquitted by a jury and eventually restored to the force, and he successfully sued the city and won his back pay.
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A Relaxier Life

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

It is said that Albert Einstein once asked, “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what are we to think of an empty desk?” While not famous for his quips—although E=mc2 is the soul of wit in its brevity—this neatly captures the perspective of a person who kept his desk almost confrontationally cluttered.

The human mind is an organizer, the greatest one we happen to know, the one that all of our tools and machines are built in an attempt to replicate its principles and imagined actions. Nature itself does not organize. Every organizing structure we come up with is an imposition on nature and is thus radically random, at least as far as nature is concerned: No method of organizing is more “correct” than any other.
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