there are times i want to cry

to weep an ocean of grainy sobs

full of grounded and grinding pain

pouring from the innards of my over-wroughted heart

i am full of agony of our abused and haggard poor

of our over-laden and burdened masses of the plain

knowing not where or how to move about the overload of wants and whims

but aching for the simple and the constant urge to live

oh i want to weep for myself and the others standing about

waiting for Some One to show again, to relieve us from the bout

of the common 'gainst the common, against the rich, against the poor

to know that one day, some day we'll stand as a common lot and hail

we'll stand together shouting for the Hallelujah-One

stand high with louder urges for a promised land to come

while we weep as forlorn brother-sister on the shores of the waiting land

for the parousia to unearth and lift us to HU-MAN

*...when I hear Americans talking about their need for emotional closure, I realize just how awful our fear of the past is. This country has been written in tragedy, and we have been willing to forget it.  It doesn't seem too far fetched to me that in another generation this might be forgotten, too.  Americans are brilliant at that.  We have given ourselves to amnesia.  That's why the world wants to come here.  We could call the land virgin, we imagine it as a place where nothing had ever happened here before and where every tragedy is the loss of our innocence.  Even your question proposes that now we will have to face this thing, but we have never done so before.   The Civil War was not the loss of our innocence after all.  World War II was not the loss of our innocence.  We keep getting past it.  We are puzzled by Bosnia.  We are puzzled by Northern Ireland.  We are puzzled by wars that persist.  We are now puzzled by the Middle East.  We are puzzled by Israel and the Palestinians.  We don't know why they can't solve it, and that's our best American impulse, I think - just to put an end to it. We say, you can't go on fighting forever like the Hatfields and McCoys.  Move to California. Move to Georgia.  Leave your in-laws behind.  Do something, but don't get mired in the past.  It's brilliant.

The tragedy and irony is, many of us belong to memory religions, and this is the great, continual contradiction in our lives.   We come out of a culture that is so individualistic, so Hellenistic, so centered on the individual's possibilities of moving beyond the group, beyond family, beyond community, reestablishing, redefining, re-imaging himself as herself, whatever - and we are also people who call ourselves Christians and Jews and Muslims, and therefore belong to tribal religions, religions of memory which by their nature imply that we belong to an entire tradition.  We have never been able to resolve the two impulses, and we are constantly at war.  We want to pray before the football game in East Texas, and then some individual takes the case to the Supreme Court, and the Greeks in their temple decide in favor of the I.  We struggle constantly with how much to remember and how much to choose to forget, or pretend to forget.

-Richard Rodriguez