The companion piece Your Son Out There is a song written a year ago (or so), when yet another wave of military and civilian deaths spread across the Iraqi sands. Sand is thirsty for any kind of liquid, sand receives water from the sky or from the air itself, with gratitude and with greed. But blood? Blood falls on the sand and does not vanish. Blood never vanishes, how could any leader ever imagine it might?

The words and the music arrived together, in the course of an hour or so, and the plaintive harmonica returns to the same sad refrain, finally putting a period at the end of the last strum of the guitar, with a discordant two-tone hum, starting low and rising in volume — It makes tears come to my eyes as I think about it: real music comes from beyond you and above you, and if it has any life to it, shakes you to your core — the two-tone discord starts low and rises as long as the out-breath is able to hold it, louder and louder, the drone of an air-raid siren. 

We watched another bad idea developing into tragedy and waste, and some of remembered, others of us knew from the start, that there are many responses to every situation. Some of them are worthy of ridicule, such as the Bush administration's decision to wage war on many fronts, supported by the silence or the support or the lack of activism of the American people, in places where no lasting change had any chance of being seeded. Other responses would have taken a broader view, and likely would have promoted greater stability in the world. Instead, arrogance fed by political and industrial opportunists brought us where we are today, to another embarrassment for America, one which hopefully is painful enough that We the People take a good hard look at ourselves, and choose creative, rather than destructive, options for the coming years. 

There is no merit to half of our population sniffing, "I knew it all along" — are those who saw with some clarity not the more guilty, that their sight was clear, yet they did not act? Was it that too few of our daughters and sons came home in boxes? While the sons and daughters of factional Iraq, the uncles and aunts and grandparents and schoolchildren, the shops and cafés and mosques, the generations-old disputes and generations of loves, the striving and living and dying, all that was turned under mortar and shelling and the knife by our hand — wait, let me finish: the mists of history allow us to act according to whatever beliefs we have been offered, and include fanaticism from all sides, including our own — the destroyed buildings and multitudes of their dead were never mourned here, their screams never within earshot, their broken corpses rarely within eyeshot, there was in fact a complete absence of the waste we helped inflict; so too few of us became alarmed enough to call a halt. 

So we reap what we sow… and sell what we reap. Fear, calamity, destruction. I'm afraid the national product hasn't been attractive lately; and of course few are buying, unless under duress. 

But here is something, from the bottom of Pandora's Box, or from the tiny white eye that floats within the dark swirl of the yin-yang symbol, or from the spin of the Earth from night into day: there is always a bit of Light. It just waits for you to open your eyes to it, and the astute politician — the capable politician — has a golden opportunity, literally golden, to lift a nation's rather weary head, and give it a purpose with some sheen to it. 

Hope. 

It is political leadership and political idealism which can lift us out of the mire in which we have found our feet submerged. The political always needs a cause — our nation required blood and fear as a cause, for a time. Human frailty again, an undisciplined population, reacted to the pain and to the brutality of insane men by becoming brutal and inflicting pain. We must not feel shame, because shame is an escape. We must feel responsible for our actions as a people, admit where we have erred, look at the blood-soaked rags of a middle-eastern culture, look at the fuel and the fervency we have given the immoderate fringes… we must refuse to take an accounting of the situation in narrow, short-sighted ways, then step back, reassess, and find the path toward construction. 

Political leadership will come, the soil is ripe. I wonder, are we waiting for the positivism of a younger generation, like a John Kennedy? We are certainly asking for an echo — indeed a direct a repeated quote — of FDR, "There is nothing to fear / but fear itself!" 

Hope comes in many forms. The politician who wields hope will change the community of the entire planet. Technology certainly has been one of North America's greatest assets — one which has earned the country immense wealth and power, and which even the most cynical of representatives might get behind. There is the goal of clean energy — electric and solar and wind, water and transportation, it all here, it is right here in the palm of the hand. If the billions of dollars spent on symptoms are turned instead on root problems… then this nation's industry (both the manifest and the figurative) keeps pace with others who have a jump in this race, perhaps we even take a lead. 

One goal: "By the end of this decade… a car will run on clean energy." "By the end of this decade, we will end our dependence on oil." 

By the end of this decade, this generation of American invention will have something beautiful to offer the world. Throughout this decade, this generation of American invention — working with a generation of international technologists? — will have a higher reason for being, will have other goals than creating a heat-ray that deters crowds, or lasers which can target satellites. 

We choose to come together in hope or in despair. Hope, my friends, is my choice, and wins my vote.