"Every knee will bow to Jesus NOT YOU!!!!"

  "And yet, he was the very reason we were still existing." The shrink scrawled notes.  Seen on a computer video screen. "Real time, democracy in action, embodying the Republic, living legacy.  Most of the others were dead, but not all were really dead." 

  "And it came down to that?" 

  "Yes.  But only because we are America not the world.  And he couldn't not be himself." 

  "The truth will set you free?" 

  "The truth will set you free." 

  It was total chaos on every monitor in the room where the actress and director had come to observe a new kind of news.  The very notion of 24/7 had proven to be the revelations.  "Someone should get out there," one of the bosses said as if in prison on the moon.  "For what?" A person glued to a particular monitor with six screens on one asked.  The boss of the bosses held out a master remote and clicked the room dark.  His voice was still gravel from assuming the mantel of leadership/ownership.  "It's time.  For a meeting.  Bring the coffeepot." 

"He's my Dad."

  Each person in the room not only acknowledged who the legacy-keeper in the room was, but also bullet-pointed association.  

  This was after rigorous training in parallel career paths.  And it was while the Armed Forces performed their own sort of vetting. 

  And all this was after she'd decided not to leave her family including her husband.  "You've tarnished our re 

  "Legacy.  Is what we are meeting about in this room Hill, ary." 

  "Why?  What does it matter?" 

  "Well, the United States of America always leaves a legacy.  There, here 

  "And policy.  Also that." 

"Hell yeah, they rushed the room."

  The mother kept patting the baby's bottom. 

  "What's happening?" 

  "We need someone to interpret." 

  "But they were speaking Englush." 

  The photographic facts were hauling in behind narrative which had almost jeopardized "saving the world". 

  Oh man. 

  Is this the fiasco? 

  "Cut the tape.  Cut the 

  "DO NOT." 

  "Just gimme the low down." 

  "I will.  I will show you to the elevator." And they walked that way while the young man sent to git the info confessed that he had not come up that way.  The elevator doors opened.  "There's more coming up the stairs!" An impeccable professional beamed a permasmile unless. 

  "Okay.  Okay.  Now I know what's going on." The mama recounted in brief style the salient points of the thread of news having to do with "the blue dress" and the anger and outrage forming around:  Then I was kind of afraid.  To apply. 

  "Pretend there's a glass box around you, uh, us."  And, it wasn't all that hard to do since the people enacting "the drama" in front of us weren't us.  We knew who they were, and we knew about their different "masks" as "actors", and we knew that most of us had been putting our best foot forward!  

  But like a spool of thread on a sewing machine and us getting settled into "roles" and possibly "careers" as the point of "the truth" the automation/animation of group took over.

A crowd had gathered.

 The mix of peacekeepers and people in plain clothes had devolved in "its middle" from its crisp line at one end, near the ships, and at the other end, a garden of wildflowers into a noisy, bubbly, mix.  

  "Was it on orders?????" 

  As the smoke and dust began to settle into the same sort of mix as the all-around desert oasis mirage-like quality, it was little people, some walking on thighs, one walking on hands, that manipulated the blown off arm and attached machine gun away from the road.  The soldier in front of the tanks coming had walked over a landmined spot.  And just kept walking.  Without the arm and the attached machine gun.  Blood splattered onto the seated and lying about and clapping and yawning alike. 

  Mouths yelling but no sound in the sound of all sounds put together. 

Voting nightmares.

  See God. 

  Showed me Matthew 20. 

  And it feels like parents sending kids to college.  Us aging people often overworry.  That may not be the most helpful. 

  Grad school '97

  As just white Christians we were at a loss to re-program the programming that seemed pretty much literally bulldozed. 

  Hate the Corporations NOT the people, a funky sweatered more artistic Academic from one type of degree's residency had stayed to pass the torch of occupying campus to the M.A. people. 

  One of the first incidents of strong whole school umbrella safety needed happened outside the only meeting room with table, chairs, and "a sofa".  Quite overlooked as an item of value somehow indicating preferential treatment.

Already old.

  Even the little kids who'd been used as bloodbags.  

  People were propped up on folding wooden chairs, not awake, not asleep.  "There's nothing left of them," a Red Cross nurse assured. 

  A pillow feather literally Elmer glued to a man's upper lip indicated still breathing.  

  Stop it.  The nurse harshed at a hysterical woman.  The woman did.  She visibly smoothed the turmoil of having lost everything but breath, the stuff of life itself, deeper and deeper into her body.  Past the hole in her midriff where the baby had been growing. 

  We'd been served our values, principles, points, and appendages in some cases on the fine dining luxury wares hoarded onto stranded at sea.  This after being thrown from planes, routed from cities, dragged from farmlands, gathered by the unmistakable and growing swirl of had enough.  The crucible of warfare.  We'd been fed the Constitution and enjoyed it.  Spat out broken bloody teeth and through eyes swollen shut with bruise and pus, renewed vows. 

  To life and liberty. 

  To each other. 

  To being AMERICA. 

  "Act dead," other nurses with a world of accents but little cupcake toothpick American flags in buttonholes giggled at our performance.  Snap, snap went the cameras.  Snap, snap went the hypnotist's fingers.  Snap, snap went the twigs under the foot of the enemy who dared to board.  Bullets in the shoulder curled the man's body like a parchment scroll as our own flag was unfurled from its umbrella stand rest.

The man did not want to hear

  about "the birth of autonomous warfare".  He ducked into a sunfilled room.  Window glass so thin the birds outside heralding the end of winter may as well have been inside. 

  An involuntary grunt-chuckle escaped his chest when people brought the happening to his attention.  "Isn't that an oxymoron?" He asked and his thinning lips curled into a snarl and a smile.  He looked at family and organization photographs around the room.  "I'll need to talk to some of my Army buddies before I have much to say."  It was a dismissed, but no one left. 

"I cannot tell you

  what to say.  Or, what you will see."  The in-charge admitting we are at that point.  

  The cubicled server rooms.  A faint hum buried in the projection of cool air. 

  Monitors and screens blipping and imaging.  

  Vehicle after vehicle exploded.

"It was quick and it was forever."

  Jesus judged the fig tree.  The same Jesus that was walking around in a chaotic world sheperding people who can and do wander off course.  Fall out of relationship with an Almighty who created this place, earth, with all it's mystery of "life". 

  This was a supernatural "miracle" or life-shifting happening.  Performed by a man and a God.  The awesomeness of that kind of power, nearly impossible "to explain" to people not really capable of "understanding"; not truly able to just automatically strategize for "souls" all by ourselves; especially without admitting we don't know everything, we do err, we need forgiveness.  Hard sometimes to have "faith", hard to believe.  Difficult to glimpse and grasp a notion of a big, all powerful something. 

"Mr. So-and-So, are you

  a political operative or are you a Christian Democrat?" The young woman was dressed in a well-pressed girl shirt and black pants.  She was not happy.  In college she'd studied law and journalism.  After school, in a flooding job market amidst housing and immigration crisis, she took some pro bono work.  The enforcement agents pretended not to listen. 

  "We were all friends."  Mr. So-and-So took off his glasses and pressed his hands onto sore points on his forehead and temples.  His suit coat was tight on his shoulders. 

  "Write it." The more experienced journalist at the conference table pressed a professionally manicured fingernail onto the table in front of the legal pad and tapped it. 

  Everyone in the room including the agents of enforcement had been blocked in not under arrest, post having been in the detention center to discuss testament, testimony.  A judiciary person had pre-warned, that Judge doesn't have time to deal with a bunch of people who have no idea what they are doing. 

  A kick under the table.  "Are you a victim?"  

  "I don't know what any of this is about anymore." And that was more true than people re-naming the same thing in as many ways as their "angles" or motivations required.  "At what point activism and other job?  Your journalism.  It's not what I learned is journalism.  I came here as a journalist and I am leaving as a journalist!"  The blinds in another conference room went up and people got up from that table.  "I'm sorry that we're all going through this." 

  "Why are you sorry?" 

  "I'm ashamed of my Country.  Sorry that people my age aren't, can't, do more." 

  "You are not who should be apologizing." 

  "It's not his fault either." 

  "Oh? A president's man are you?" 

  "Hardly a man.  And not any more a fan of him than I am of you." 

  The door was opened and left open.  Gradually everyone left the room.

  Shit or get off the pot.  The microtape recorder said over and over in the port-a-potty.  "No place to shit!" A man's voice was a muffled boom.  His briefcase pushed the door open and his toupè was crooked on his head as the door slammed behind him.  A shaved-headed woman from Brazil went next. 

  "Is this the one?" 

  Someone nodded. 

  Someone shook head, pathetic. 

  An Irish brogue called out, "I've never filed this way before.  But I feel greatly relieved." 

  "Pick your poison.  Pick your poison.  What's yer poison girlie?" The variety of liquor bottles ranged from airplane serving size to jugs labeled with homemade piles of bones and fat heads with tongues sticking out.  "We're sticking with the milk," a familiar face smiled and his hand reached a six pack of milk in glass bottles up onto the plywood box containing audio speakers.  "Everything's getting bigger the closer we get to the hangars." 

  "Not you guys.  As whatever I am in this moment, I refuse to let you go Overseas." 

  "You look like a farm boy in those rolled up jeans." 

  "We were obliged to do some local advertising." 

  "Political?" 

  He opened a milk and downed the actual nutrition.  Milk mustache.  "You're wearing jeans too," he stated factually.  "Someone give you the spoiler alert?" 

  "I don't know what that is." 

  "Must be why they picked you and," he looked around the barn area, "Them," he pointed with the empty bottle of milk.  "For what?" 

  "To go west young people.  Or north or wherever 'Braska is." 

  "But..."

  "No."

"But, you gave me the pens."

  Our Dad had spent the whole ten days of us kids being grounded working, and, being fed and sat like Mr. Cleaver in his recliner with slippers and newspaper in the evenings.  His slippers were gigantic, fuzzy affairs with large bear claw appendages that flopped around when he stomped to the bathroom. 

  It was true that he'd gifted me each pen on a birthday or milestone event at school.  But it was also true that he'd conducted a red-faced, lip twisting, almost sweaty raid of every nook and cranny where the precious treasures might be stashed.  Our mother stood apart from him, arms crossed, not really looking at any of us, and covering a couldn't-help-but laugh in her shoulder acting as if her nose itched. 

  "How could you?" He'd hoisted the growing number of pens found into the air.  "WE DON'T need you to write about OUR LIVES.  WE'RE LIVING IT!!!!!!!" 

  A deafening silence followed.  For a full five days.  That was how I fell in with some Asians.  Two of us were both ten. 

  "Pandas don't have pens but they still exist." A big Asian brother told us girls.  A slender hand started to reach towards a face swollen with tears but re-directed itself to a box of tissues.  His sister clutched the box.  Heavy sighs. 

  I sat on the medium-hard plastic packaging the sofa.  Mrs. Asian's decor was very ivory in color with dramatic splashes and jags of deep, dark colors.  An ebony-colored vase which looked almost squashed, like it was standing up almost flat had a spray of greenish leaves sticking up out of it.  Eucalyptis, the girl named the dried out plant my eyes fell on.  An ornate deeply red wooden sitting chair.  The dragons on the arms and legs dumb-eyed.  Mouths wide open.  Soft-edged pieces of jade shades; stone chess pieces on a yellowing bumpy board.  Paper lanterns on a snarled up yarn string.  No patience, the little girl explained.  She and I were the same size, different-looking human features.  But we knew each other as pandas.  

  We'd found each other as such in the woods.  We'd each hidden our bicycles.  Stashed food and pencil bags.  There'd been no paper at my school.  And slipped out of wordly cares by imagining the woods like a still, shimmering pool of water.  We'd glanced at each other feeling tree bark, scooping catepillars into hands, moving crispy leaves to find lady bugs, and finding bigger and bigger leaves.  We just did this.  Without talking because we didn't speak the same language.  She'd shown me in the Atlas:  Cambodia.  

  The teacher having a hard time with all the rules about Catholic school, like us kids, gave me two panda stickers and I gave one to my panda friend.  She opened a big metal desk's top drawer and put the sticker next to the neat row of twisting pencils and click pens.  A feather had jumped up when she opened the drawer.  She tried to smooth it back in place but it kept sticking to her finger.  Then the back of her hand.  She shook it.  It floated and she pointed it into place.  Grown ups were coming so she closed the drawer quickly and opened a square in the wall.  We sat Indian-style in the square.  We saw legs and heard lots of talking in the "peephole".  Then they went out the front door.  And we just did our giggling in silence.  Like a silent movie.