The rain has just started a
few hours ago but the giant mounds of dirty compacted
snow surrounding the parking lot are already noticeably
smaller. Ominously, the weather
man on WB56 is warning "This... when combined with snow
melt from northern New England... is likely to cause the
most serious river flooding at some locations since the
flooding of 1987." We have our own weather here in the
Merrimack Valley, as I have no doubt mentioned countless
times before, and we had a doozy of a flood in 1987.
We've had a couple of really big floods since '87 but it
remains the local standard for "big memorable flood".
Yup, it's spring.
Tomorrow is, of course, Opening
Day. Time begins again with the Red Sox throwing David
Wells up against the Yankees' latest superstar purchase,
The Big Unit. I'm tempted to underestimate David Wells
but he has pitched outstandingly in Yankee Stadium. Of
course, he was a Yankee at the time. Presumably the
deluge is either skipping New York altogether or will be
over by the first pitch.
The weather and the Red Sox, those
time honored topics of New England conversation, are
almost but not quite nudged off the front page by the
death watch for the Pope. The media have already started
the endless evaluations of JPII's legacy. What I find
interesting about this is that JPII is and was opposed to
the death penalty and opposed to war that doesn't meet
the criteria for a "just war" and included those in his
famous "culture of life" speech. Yet here in the USA,
"culture of life" only means opposition to abortion and
encouragement of keeping people "alive" by artificial
means. In the USA, "culture of life" includes the death
penalty and preemptive war against countries that did not
attack us. "Culture of life" includes cutting back
Medicare and Medicaid so deeply that the elderly and the
poor die of things that could easily be treated. And we
are not a third world country. American conservatives
embrace the Pope as an icon because he opposes abortion,
but they blithely ignore his opposition to the death
penalty and his adherence to the just war theory. I don't
get it. I'll never get it. Bring me a mustard seed from a
home where no one has ever died. In the words of the
Buddha "Men die and they are not happy" or in the
immortal words of a local Boston band, The Fools, "Life
sucks and then you die."
Uh, oh, I've gotten political
again. So I might as well mention what a useless
figurehead Governor I've Got Great Hair and Live in Utah
has been in dealing with the leaks in the tunnel. For
readers outside the Greater Big Dig Area, our zillion
dollar thousand year project to reroute Boston traffic is
now in its endgame and the results are, to put it mildly
, not what we had hoped for. At last count , there are 96
known leaks in the tunnel. Leaks let in water, mind you,
not something you want in a tunnel under Boston. Water is
a power greater than ourselves. Kind of like
life.
Postscript: Shortly after I wrote
this, news of JPII's death came on the radio. May his
peace-loving soul rest in peace.
