was permissible

I have been told that my writing is beautiful. It has pierced the hearts of tens of readers across the country. However, recently I have been reading Cry, the Beloved Country and realized, what beautiful writing really is. If you have not read this book, I strongly recommend it. It is amazing how well Alan Paton can put a few sentences together and describe a landscape, and a people. Here is a sampling from the first chapter.

The great red hills stand desolate, and the earth has torn away like flesh. The lightning flashes over them, the clouds pour down upon them, the dead streams come to life, full of the red blood of the earth. Down in the valleys women scratch the soil that is left and the maize hardly reaches the height of a man. They are valleys of old men and old women, of mothers and children. The men are away, the young men and the girls are away. The soil cannot keep them any more.

I read this, and then think about my last blog, and how my main idea was a "for profit vasectomy tent" located at the hippo exhibit at the zoo. This man could write so that you could feel it. As I am reading this book I have just gotten so swept up in the story and the characters and the beauty of it all. So it with all this being said; I introduce today's blog as a blatant rip off/ tribute to Cry, the Beloved Country. The story is based around the family members of two people, a murdered white civil rights activist who fought for the rights of "natives" (Africans) and his killer (a native). When the father of the activist is in his son's study, he comes across one of his son's pieces of writing. And it is this writing that I have ripped off, reworded and tried to make my own. If you own the book, it is located on the third page of chapter 20.

was permissible. It was permissible when we were born into wealth and were comforted by it. It is not permissible when we find that our dogs are overweight while 24000 children on the other side of the world died of malnourishment, or easily treated diseases. It was permissible when used that wealth to buy chocolate to comfort our hunger and our pain. It is not permissible to buy that chocolate when you know full well the only reason it is 99 cents is because there are an estimated 100,000 children in the cocoa fields. It was permissible to feel sorry for the millions dieing of AIDS in Africa, when AIDS first tore threw the continent like a plague. It is not permissible to sit idly, when you know that anti retro viral drugs exist, and allow a person with AIDS to die of old age. It is not permissible that pharmaceutical companies keep the prices of the most effective drugs high, for the sake of the almighty profit, when children watch their mothers die, and mothers watch their children suffer. It was permissible when mothers passed AIDS to their new born children, because the science and medicine did not exist to prevent transferring the virus. It is not permissible for this to happen now, when we have had the science and medicine in our own country for over a decade. We live in a world where our everyday actions affect the ability for our global neighbors to live freely and comfortably in other parts of the world. There is no reason to be insulated from this, other than personal comfort.

 If this comes across as preachy, it shouldn't. My shit stinks too. Two of our three dogs are fat.

(Not our dog)