Unapologetically copied from a website today. The words ring so true.

TOPIC: CALIFORNIA

care of: Black Dog

Let's talk about California.

Once upon a time, when the Powers That Be were deciding where shit should go, one of them, probably a younger one, said, "Let's have a place where the desert meets the sea. Better yet, we'll make it so that in some places, mountains are broken down and tumble into the sea. How beautiful that will be. And the two great ideas, the two great concepts, will clash and conflict and bash against one another. What do you say?"

And it was done. And there it was. Two great deserts, for as a better poet than I has said, the ocean is but a desert with its life underground. And these two great contradictions, the absence of water and the excess of water, ride on ragged edges together.

What do we find?

Life.

As the ocean gives up its life-giving moisture, the desert soaks it up, and life flourishes. When the winds are right and the sun is right and the ground is right, it is fucking magic. Flowers bloom where nothing else can survive. Hope is illustrated so that all but the blindest take inspiration from all that this magical terrain is. This study in contrast illustrates to all who will see what exactly what hope is.

Then came the humans. The bigots among us would like to label them, but I think they were humans. The tallest among them probably might have broken five feet, and been counted "a big guy."

They lived here. They hoped and they dreamed and they planned and they plotted and they helped each other and screwed each other over and lived real lives, as real or more real than our own. They made love and they fucked, they rescued and they raped, and they were as fallible and as saint-like as we are.

And the desert did not care. The ocean did not care. Life went on as it ever has.

They came the True Believers. These men in dark clothes learned the native languages, for these were educated men, practiced in self denial and focus and bent on saving the heathen. They spoke of a god who made himself human and hung on a tree and fucking DIED so that the heathen as well as the educated could be guaranteed paradise.

And some of the Indios [for so they came to be called; it makes no more or no less sense than calling me white or her black] believed, really believed. And some just went along, because life on the two deserts was hard, and the men in black clothes had food.

And the desert did not care. The ocean did not care. Life went on as it ever has.

Then came The Others. Allegedly of the same religion, these people were as pale of skin as the men in black clothes, but these motherfuckers would kill you. For stealing, for fighting, for looking at something of theirs or any imagined slight, these men would kill you. The Indios learned quickly, those who did not die right away.

And the desert did not care. The ocean did not care. Life went on as it ever has.

Then came the next "Others." Allegedly of the same religion, worshipping the same god who felt so bad for us He would die for our sins, these even paler people murdered the ones who were murderous, killed the killers, killed Indios, killed animals for no good reason, even killed the men in black clothes when they disagreed. The Indios who lived through this understood right away...

And the desert did not care. The ocean did not care. Life went on as it ever has.

We are doomed. We live between two deserts, here in the land they call California. We cannot stand a third desert, a desert of the heart. Where one desert will cook you if you have no water, another desert will drown you if you cannot breathe water, this desert will murder you and your children if you are not like them, if you do not think like them.

The desert does not care; if you let it, it will burn your babies. This is true.

The ocean does not care; if you let it, it will drown your babies. This is true.

One will take them by shark, the other by coyote, but both deaths are as as final.

The White Man's desert of the heart is as fatal, but far more subtle. It is the death of dreams, of the flowers that the two deserts once made.

- Black Dog