Can you stop time? Only if you’re a magazine long sealed into its own irrelevance. Even there, however, securely out of date, Time can occasionally leak into the present moment. I refer to its cover photo of a young woman whose nose and ears were cut off by the Taliban for the crime of escaping back to her family. To call the Taliban a medieval madness is to insult the Dark Ages. (Where are the Taliban’s cathedrals, tapestries, songs, poems and illuminated manuscripts?) What’s shared is a mobilizing energy. As the Catholics liked to say, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church.” Against that energy, our blundering intrusions are unlikely to accomplish anything of lasting value. The negatives are plain to anyone, and they are spreading, like the seeds of the Church.
Damaged, brutal, in the wrong against a deeper wrong, we go on, not on their side and not on our own. Given the intractable hatred of their countrymen, what can Afghan women expect from us?
Ouch! Very nice piece Regina.
very nice..we have also people living in America they can’t leave the dark ages.
love joel ross, a great artist.his work should touch each one,and thousand more viewers.
If we stay, we can’t finish it. If we go, the hell continues to spread, as you say. Between unwinable wars, the crazy weather of global warming, debt, job loss, nutty religious activists, the failure of capitalism, socialism and any other economic ism, it’s quite a world to leave our grandkids. At least Prop 8 was overturned.