Walker

"We are not even the only ones not speaking to each other. Across America elders are not speaking to each other, though most of us will find we have a lot to say, after we've cried in each other's arms. We are a frightened, a brokenhearted nation; some of us wanting desperately to run back to the illusory "safety" of skin color, money or the nineteen fifties. We've never seen weather like the weather there is today. We've never seen violence like the violence we see today. We've never seen greed or evil like the greed and evil we see today. We've never seen tomatoes either, like the ones being created today. There is much from which to recoil.
And yet, strangers who perhaps I am never to know, the past doesn't exist. It cannot be sanctuary. Skin color has always been a tricky solace, more so now that the ozone has changed. After nature is destroyed, money will remain inedible. We have reached a place of deepest emptiness and sorrow. We look at the destruction around us and perceive our collective poverty. We see that everything that is truly needed by the world is too large for individuals to give. We find we have only ourselves. Our experience. Our dreams. Our simple art. Our memories of better ways. Our knowledge that the world cannot be healed in the abstract. The healing begins where the wound was made.
Now it seems to me we might begin to understand something of the meaning of earnest speaking and fearless listening; something of the purpose of the most ancient form of beginning to remake the world: remembering what the world we once made together was like.
I send you my sorrow. And my art.
In the sure knowledge that our people, the American race, lovers who falter and sometimes fail, are good."


May 18, 2001