“Water, is taught by thirst”
Emily Dickinson and Mississippi’s Water Fiasco
Water is taught by thirst;
Land, by the oceans passed;
Transport, by throe;
Peace, by its battles told;
Love, by memorial mould;
Birds, by the snow.Emily Dickinson, Poems
Perhaps water is taught by thirst,
But have we really learned
That babies need their bottoms cleaned
Even if the waterworks have overturned?
Thirsty. Thirsty. Too many thirsty children.
Dirty. Dirty. Too many unclean hands to sanitize this source.
What to do, when paid finger pointers prominently return
In cozy callous disregard as pipelines clog their course?
Love, by Confederate memorial molds,
Mocks many hands that all the children’s water sold.
- Tom Tordillo © 2022
Dozens of television screens at my gym flash news from numerous stations. On the stair climber machines in the cardio area, FoxNews airs full time. Five minutes every few days is about as much of a dose of Tuck Carlspun as I will endure.
He’s blaming the ‘radical mayor’ of Jackson, Mississippi for the water problems. Interesting. A vast litany of private contractors were paid to fix those problems almost 10 years ago. But those contractors might donate to Republicans in Mississippi. The fact that one of them paid out close to $100 million in a settlement after failing to do the job it was hired to do is irrelevant (because other contractors connected to that company pay for ads on Tuck’s station).
There’s a lot of finger pointing. Too much.
Please, soul of mine, put that aside and see differently.
Firefighters. “Recruits”? Volunteers? In Jackson, Mississippi, there are thousands of people stepping up as quickly as they can to respond to this crisis. Probably tens of thousands.
More are coming.
Water is taught by thirst. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for…I was thirsty, and you gave me nothing…whatever you do for the least of these…
