"
No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people."
-- H. L. Mencken, Notes on Journalism (1926)
Oh, we might as well be wanderers, mightn't we? Could it be worse to have no home at all, than to feel that your neighbours are strangers and your country an unfamiliar and bewildering place? Surely we might as well go walking until we find a place where fires warm instead of burn, where we can be a part of welcoming the future rather than willingly ourselves ceaselessly to be the last ones through the door. Where is that now, I wonder?
Down in the city in the early morning, everything was still. Not the stillness of a coming storm, but the uneasy peace of good people - slumbering, duty done - when all around lurks the silent ocean, insular and indifferent, pulling at their hair and heels as they sleep. Ah, but we woke to find ourselves surrounded, sole survivors of a sea we were not meant to sail, everywhere the lapping drag massing at the hull and seeping through the boards. No storm brought us here, no winds of change, no swell, only that we slept, thinking that our duties were done.
Down in the city in the early morning, we wander alone, passing gently by each other, afraid to know the answer to the only question today has to offer. Oh, there will be time for talk of unity and ramshackle mended bridges over rushing currents, and the slow swim forward together, but today there is only the question,
are you in the boat with us? Or are you the ocean?
