Eclectic Amateur

Last fall, I found that some words from Wendell Berry expressed how I felt about the murder of children at Beslan.

Today, The Morning’s News is the completion of the murder of Terri Schiavo, and the words are fresh again:

...

And I am sickened by complicity in my race.

To kill in hot savagery like a beast

is understandable.  It is forgivable and curable.

But to kill by design, deliberately, without wrath,

that is the sullen labor that perfects Hell.

...

The morning's news drives sleep out of the head

at night.  Uselessness and horror hold the eyes

open to the dark.  Weary, we lie awake

in the agony of the old giving birth to the new

without assurance that the new will be better.

I look at my son, whose eyes are like a young god's,

they are so open to the world.

I look at my sloping fields now turning

green with the young grass of April.  What must I do

to go free?  I think I must put on

a deathlier knowledge, and prepare to die

rather than enter into the design of man's hate...

— Wendell Berry, The Morning’s News, from Farming: A Handbook

God have mercy.
Christ have mercy.
God have mercy.