"Breath of Eternity on Your Lips"

Though it was released in 1992, I have just recently been listening to Bruce Springsteen's "The Rising" cd. I can't stop playing the song "Paradise", which has a haunting, acoustic sound behind words which I can't shake. Most troubling in this first person account of a terrorist's suicide/homocide bombing is the first verse:

Where the river runs to black,
I take the school books from your pack.
Plastics, wire and your kiss -
Breath of eternity on your lips.
In the crowded marketplace.
I drift from face to face.
I hold my breath and close my eyes.
I hold my breath and close my eyes.
And I wait for paradise.
And I wait for paradise.

I have been feeling blue lately as it is and now this song has really struck some sort of melancholy chord in me. There is an uneasiness in my life right now, which doesn't just involve the usual elements - work, kids, money - but which is literally global. Peggy Noonan wrote a column last year about her growing sense that "tough history is coming," and I have that sense right now, too. And it distresses me though I don't think there is anything I can do about it.

I support the War on Terror, and have from the beginning, but I am deeply troubled by it. I've called pacifism a "cheap virtue" because it's so easy to say you oppose warfare from behind a line of rough men and women prepared to do violence on your behalf. But my support for our war in Iraq and Afghanistan is no less cheap, because those actions have required great sacrifices - but none by me personally. I've never known the terror of a night patrol in a hostile area. I don't have to reconcile my humanity with the necessity to use deadly force for the sake of my mission. I've lost no sleep worried about the safety of a loved one in harm's way. But I worry that a time of such sacrificing may be in store for me, my family, my city.

I remember drills in grade school to prepare us for a nuclear attack by the Soviet Union, but don't remember actually being afraid. I've got an uneasy feeling now I never had then, probably because I don't have just myself to worry about.

So there you go! Wait two months for me to post an update to this blog, and you get this dose of bad tasting medicine as your reward. So sorry!