Peakah's Provocations...

I am so sick of the news right now I could puke.

Snotty reporters snidely report about insignificant indictments on Capitol Hill as France burns because of their collective loss of any sense of nationalism.

Meanwhile Bush galivants through South America giving Venezuelan leader Chavez a soapbox to preach fear to our salivating press.

This is where I take the paper and chuck it in the garbage... what a joke.

So instead I'll retreat to the comfort of one of my favorite poems. It never ceases to amaze me how well arranged words have the power to induce a renewed blaze of revelatory and universal understanding.

Huh? I think I bumped my head...

If-

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;
If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with triumph and disaster
And treat those two imposters just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,
And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breath a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

Rudyard Kipling, 1895.

Forgive me, just one of those moods...

inexplicably linked with Don Surber, Basil's Blog, The Political Teen, Stop the ACLU, Cao's Blog, Wizbang, Point Five, and MVRWC.