The ever so talented J. V. Shepperd, a great friend and a woman of wisdom, shared with me her manifesto at the dawn of 2013. I asked her permission to let my readers in on it, and she kindly agreed.
What if we all owned a safe
and comfortable house in a village where humanity was sacrosanct and the community
robust from the benefit of every resource at work on the elimination of
disease, the provision of clean water and defense of the world peace we take
for granted?
Our towns could be the
infrastructure of whole states and countries whose battles are fought with and
over words, sentence structure, placement in the line. A conquest between poets, or patterns and
colors of light splashed on the concrete walls of our enduring structures. The enemy's wounds and our own would be
painful, unforgettable, perhaps a salve in our eventual healing but never
fatal.
War's prize is
communication with the booty of shared wisdom.
Let the entire nation rejoice in the beauty that one city can make over
another. And if language is the construct that shapes what we are, our words would
define, compel and invent us, and outside the walls of our civilization "destruction"
is left on the pavement, idle, empty and unable to kill, where it proves no threat to an unknown future of unformed and
magnificent ideas that can't be splayed across a classroom in the dead brains
of formerly growing minds.
Fear, hatred and its
cruelty are sheathed by intelligence, tolerance and the inability of ignorance
to take the day. Religion isn't our
difference but our celebration and borders aren't east west divisions with
covetous lines but passageways. Savagery
is not in the lexicon by noun or engagement.
And if our laws provide us
with allegiance - it is to meaning and theory, not to the practice of what already
exists. Because improvement is a constant democracy that we owe to our
children.
If it's true that only
crazy people believe that they can change the world, then let's be crazy and
change.
